I am currently in the exploratory phase of a book length project. I have just over 125 pages of writing that is planned to be in three sections: language, politics, and reality (ontology, metaphysics, whatever). I have completed the sections on language and politics, in both cases drawing a contrast between the orderliness of concepts and the orderliness of experience. In the language section this takes the form of an exploration of therapy using the dyad of trellis talk and capture talk. In the politics section I explore the history modernity in relation to the present state of psychological and psychiatric institutions, using the dyad of convivial and manipulative institutions. In this third section, which I've just begun and am posting here, I am applying a similar approach ("the two orders") to the problem of reality, science, and philosophy in general. I am trying to understand how reality can be such that we can experience language and institutions these ways. How is it possible that there is an animal that is so intimately interwoven with speech that its natural development is contingent upon how it speaks? How is it that this animal has learned to speak (and build and symbolize) in such a way that it 'captures' itself? How must we think about reality to make these things both intelligible and integral (as in maintaining their integrity, not reducing them to crude concepts). This writing is my beginning of my current attempt to work through these ontological questions.
3. Reality, The Two Orders, and the Shape of Science
I have used the word ‘real’ in different ways throughout my life. It seems like an indispensable word. I’ll have to start tracking how often clients use the word real, or how they use the word. My sense is that the question of “how I really feel” or “what’s really going on” is always at play. Most people have a sense that they could be misperceiving, making things up, or projecting. Sanity is somehow about being in touch with reality. An animal that is living a good life or is healthy is interacting with its environment in ways that evince their grasp of reality. Animals understand and have functional knowledge of their environments: that this can be eaten or that can be climbed, that this branch will support my weight, or this height will keep me safe. Humans and animals are inherently interactive with their environments and therefore must somehow encounter the reality of that environment, even if through different bodies. The fish’s experience of water, for example, must radically differ from the human experience of water. But I have a hard time believing that there is no overlap in our phenomenology (the feel of gliding through water, feeling a current push against you, some sense of temperature). There is something in the nature of the ocean that a fish and human both encounter but in different ways. We get different angles on the reality that is the sea.
Yesterday, 10/27/22, I was reading Keir’s dissertation and it strikes me as relevant to this problem of reality. While discussing the problem of false opinion Keir gives the example of a fly being eaten by a venus fly trap. “When a fly lands on a venus fly trap and is snapped up by it, the venus fly trap has said false things to the fly—and the fly has believed them. The issue is perhaps this: we are at a distance from being. Being is neither fully present to us nor totally absent” (141). Keir goes on to name this as the problem of appearance (of course reality is generally contradistinct from appearance, illusion, fantasy, artifice, construction, or the like). “Appearance, for us, however, is never mere appearance. Mere appearance is a philosophical construct. Real appearance is always the appearance of something, even if we can’t say exactly of what. This ‘of’ is somehow the source of the problem. Because we are at a distance from being, we can never rest purely passive in our reception of it, but must always move out to meet it halfway” (141). As human beings we interact with reality (‘move out to meet it halfway’) in particularly complex ways (discussed above). Like plants we have a body that reconstitutes itself in relation to the environment. Like the other animals we have an experience of behavior space (and I agree with Gendlin when he says we interact with reality mainly with our hands and mouths). We are unique, however, in that we engage symbols as such, moving beyond animal gesturing towards the FLIP space where the intergestural context becomes a complex symbolic system, entrenched in buildings, institutions, and structures of all kinds. For us, therefore, the attempt to meetreality must navigate at least two layers of appearance. We must first confront the apparent reality of our political community, always distorted by doxa, and then somehow redeploy those same concepts in relation to the appearances of nature as we encounter it. Our movement from appearance to reality is double. First political, then natural.
Interaction is only possible in time. The pattern of action, response, action (implying-occurring, interaction) requires there to be something like time or process. It is clear that in the universe, at least for us, time only goes one way. There is only further change and development. There is no going back. I love The Midnight’s song WeMoveForward (their first song), “because we can’t go back.” And I love the lyrical refrain they offer on their new song “Heartbeat”: “We keep going 'cause we can't go back, no / We keep going 'cause we can't go back.” Things are not simply temporal but developmental, or Carl Rogers would say formative. Things seem to come together on their own, getting organized, adopting shapes and cycles. Indeed, I will be concerned with the literature on self-organizing systems or developmental systems theories or similar things I don’t know enough about. Living things are a particularly strange and unique form of self-organizing systems. We have this thing called experience, which is a unique form of developmental process that involves an ‘internal’ quality with aspects like learning, exploring, encountering, and so on. I suppose I’ll preliminarily rely on Nagel’s “What is it like?” definition of life or consciousness. It is a good enough starting place. It is in time that we use language and interact with reality. We interact with reality as living beings that have a ‘what it is like’ to be us. Thus any talk about reality is necessarily going to be talk about time or developmentality, and more specifically it will be talk both about and from the space of lived development (or growth).
I want to organize this section into two basic chunks. The second will be a general ontological or metaphysical statement about how I think about reality. Perhaps more importantly, I will be concerned with how to talk about how to talk about reality. Because the plain fact is that we can’t talk about reality in some simple sense (like drawing a map), as Keir notes. There is something about the way our languages work that talking about reality generates a gap of some kind. We can’t just ‘say how things are’. Talking is too obviously a part or aspect of reality that it could never stand sufficiently outside of reality to talk “about” “it” in some precise or specific way. Talking about reality is really more like talking with or from or out of reality. We have to speak as a part of the thing being discussed and not pretend to have some distance or objective space. I want to develop a way of speaking about reality that accounts for our being within reality, inseparable and emergent from its processes. Acknowledging our embeddedness, however, does not mean that we are incapable of developing meaningful images or accounts of reality in general. It just means that those images or accounts will be more self-consciously understood, we will not have naive ambitions of just saying how things are. Rather, we will follow Gendlin in developing/pursuing a concept that is capable of exhibiting and describing at the same time.
More specifically, I am interested in concepts that describe the processual nature of things while also participating in that process. The key to this is allowing concepts to be developmental in both how we read and write. As a reader, this means understanding that the meaning of words is not simply on the page, words don’t just “mean what they mean,” there is no perfect dictionary. To read a text (just like listening to a person) we have to track the way the words are used and what sorts of experiential responses the text generates in us. (What are you wanting these words to do?) Well written books are developmental and they must be read so that words and concepts can acquire complexity as the text develops. Similarly, as a writer, I want to use concepts developmentally, track and expand their meaning. Indeed, this is what I’ve tried to do throughout this text, asking readers to ‘roll up’ or ‘carry forward’ the meaning of one term into another. I have tried to exhibit complex mutations of concepts where esotericism can come to overlap with irony and both can be shown to overlap with love. And then to show how these concepts surrounding language can be folded into an analysis of institutions. Finally I am putting those same concepts to work in the domain of ontology or reality.
In writing, reading, or listening this way I am self-consciously engaging with the two orders: the order of language and the order of experience. Words only ever have meaning in relation to ongoing experiencing, which is implicitly intricate in ways that words can never convey. In the first section I showed that trellis talk concerns the relationship between the two orders; trellis talk leaves space for a person to be in process, and therefore invites their intricate becoming. The symbols are intended to stimulate this more intricate experiential process. In trellis talk the concern is not with the symbols in their logical relations or implying, but rather the symbols as they enable experiential development. It isn’t about the symbols, in a certain sense. In my writing on politics I showed that modern institutions are particularly adept at capturing people, squashing their capacity for intricate relating or selfhood. Now I want to show how this capacity for intricate experience has implications for science, philosophy, and intellectual or personal inquiry of any kind. This is not just a problem of language or politics, it is a problem of reality. How is it that there are multiple forms of order that are distinct but also emergent and interactive? More specifically, emphasizing the subservience of language to the intricate order will highlight the significance of response in any form of inquiry (like eliciting in therapy or conviviality in institutions). Approached with the idea of language as capable of generating responses (from the intricate order) philosophy would need to become more dialectical, science would need to change its attitude towards experimentation (like Kimmerer says), and persons in general would be capable of deep listening and know how to further conversations in growthful ways.
Becoming aware of the two orders, self-consciously thinking, writing, and living in relation to them could be described as becoming more first-personal. To be first-personal is to recognize the primacy of experience not just in theory but in practice; it is to feel oneself living out of one’s body, with all its capacity for sensing into the complexities of our situations. I told a client recently that I think of therapy as a process of becoming first-personal. As we move deeper into our bodies there is more familiarity with native desire, easier for us to make decisions about difficult things, a greater trust in ourselves. This being-first-personal is significant also in philosophizing and science. Gendlin argues in “What First and Third Person Processes Really Are” that scientists need to begin to talk explicitly about how they are working with their ‘implicit understanding’ or felt sense of things. Gendlin is right to point out that we generally only hear about how a concept is better, not where it comes from. Inviting scientists or philosophers to be more-first personal (to engage in and discuss direct reference to experiencing in their process of concept formation) may be difficult because these are professions that operate in institutional spaces. Institutional spaces, as observed, are generally highly third-personal spaces: they maximize efficiency and reduce people to roles by zooming out and generalizing. They take a third-person point of view and in doing so train people in the self-conditioning of their first-person experience, subjecting it to an external gaze.
Thus these are questions I am asking and themes I want to track. Given what has been said about language and our political institutions, what does it mean to speak meaningfully about reality? Speaking about reality means speaking about time, development, or process. How does language, which is so often structure bound, lend itself to the task of discussing or describing processes? How does our analysis of trellis talk apply not only to therapeutic contexts, but also to philosophical and scientific processes? How does the goal of discussing reality interact with the distinction between first- and third-person science? My hunch, or basic hypothesis, is that the biggest difficulty to surmount is that we are attempting to describe a whole of which we are a part with partial access to this whole (to paraphrase Strauss and invoke Nagel). The world changes and we change with it, and therefore it can never be described finally (I think of the Judge in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, burning natural things after documenting them so he has perfect knowledge of them. They can not change, for then he would no longer know them. Thus he must destroy them to preserve the perfection of his knowledge). Third-person science is a sort of theory that destroys us or leaves us out altogether. Deacon’s Incomplete Nature will be my example of this. It pretends to speak from a perspective in which seemingly no observer exists and then tries to reconstruct the observer from this nowhere perspective. The gap between the descriptions and reality is palpable. I was deeply disappointed when I reached the end of Deacon’s book and it took me some time to understand exactly why: he never makes the turn to first-person perspective as such, only ever talking about it from a third-person perspective. First-person science, by contrast, can significantly close this gap between the description of the world and experience. Gendlin’s A Process Model will be my example. I believe Gendlin’s theory meets Nagel’s requirement of being able to ‘turn on itself’ and explain the existence of the theory and the theorizer. Gendlin gives a description of natural, emergent processes that ultimately explain the capacity for symbol making and ultimately theorizing. When you arrive at the end of the text you realize that the text itself is an example of what it is describing, the theory is capable of exhibiting and accounting for its own existence. The text itself is responsive and developmental, displaying the dialectic of symbol and experiencing. Gendlin invites you into his own stream of experiencing that allowed him to construct his model. Ultimately the process model will be the larger model, capable of nesting and moderating the unit model. The ultimate form of science that Gendlin advocates for is a multi-directional dialectic between the unit model, the explication model, and ongoing direct reference to the process of experiencing from which both models emerged. But we must learn this way of using concepts and this way of thinking of ourselves in a deeply first-personal way. The experience has genuinely changed me.
In doing this I am trying to suss out the nature of scientific and philosophical inquiry in general. This also necessarily means understanding the nature of language. Such big, general questions, however, always need particular subject matters as fodder and evidence. Therefore in the first section I will be pursuing an account of scientific psychology as a way of clarifying science, philosophy, and language in general.
3.1 The Meaning of General Psychology: Psyche, Development, Emergence
Pursuing the question, “What is psychology?” is important to me for both practical and theoretical purposes. Practically my concerns are varied but pertain to both my personal and professional life. I’m a psychotherapist and I’m deeply engaged with what psychology in America is right now. I also am someone who has benefitted very deeply from good psychotherapy and am invested in continuing to heal and grow as a person. Reading, writing, and understanding psychology is important for all of this. And then theoretically I am also interested for both practical and then more strictly theoretical reasons. I think theory is practical. I am very persuaded by a strong version of the word ‘phenomenology’ in which it points to the fact that, as humans, we can’t “see” things with depth and clarity unless we are able to conceptualize them or articulate them in some way. Theory is essential in outlining complex features of reality that can then be seen without the concept. Theoretical concepts, when repeatedly applied to actual observation, will begin to function implicitly in our quiet looking and listening. I also just think theorizing is fun and have a strictly theoretical interest in these theoretical questions! So there is the practical side of theory and the theoretical side of theory.
Psychology is poorly theorized. The field is a hodge podge of methodologies, definitions, orientations, purposes, and priorities (and funding sources). I am not aware of many American authors pursuing accounts of “general psychology” that try to give some unity to the field as a whole. The situation feels more like what Cabanas & Illouz describe in Manufacturing Happy Citizens, to paraphrase, ‘the field has to reinvent itself every 10-20 years to continually try and reestablish its relevance and therefore funding.’ The prestige of psychology, in my opinion, is not very well deserved, as much of the field consists of empty verbal platitudes paraded as knowledge. This tone and sort of wanton claim won’t make the book version, ha. I know there are a lot of psychologists I’m unaware of who have probably tried things like this.
A recent account of general psychology that I admire is Niels Engelsted’s Catching up With Aristotle: A Journey in the Quest for General Psychology. Engelsted views the field somewhat as I described above, as a disparate and largely incompatible smattering of methodologies and theories. Engelsted claims that psychology fundamentally ask about the meaning of the word psyche, indeed the central term of the discipline. Engelsted claims we should follow Aristotle and Alexi Leontiev in claiming that the problem of psyche (or soul, psuche, for Aristotle) essentially concerns the difference between the living and non-living. For Aristotle this would be things that have their principle of motion inside of them, as opposed to outside of them. If we have a stone in our hand and we throw it at a tree it will simply hit the tree. If we have a healthy bird in our hand, however, and we toss it toward a tree it will likely not hit the tree, instead it will fly in whatever direction it feels. The bird, unlike the stone, has some source of motion within itself. Soul or psyche is a placeholder for whatever this thing is that allows the bird to move (or the plant to grow or us to live as we do). For Leontiev the problem of psyche would be answered similarly in terms of the origins of sensation. Leontiev was heavily interested in the meaning of the sensate body. I think of plants as having senate bodies, that they have some sort of simple interactive life with reality (I recall Gendlin saying “plants are interacting with reality all the time”). Engelsted thus claims that psychology must essentially be a science of the developing complexity of sensate bodies. He proposes a four part scheme beginning with sentience (largely in the present) and moving through intentionality (a sense of the future), mind (a view of the past), and human consciousness (capable of ‘the outside view’).
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