Reflections on Political Anxiety: Friendship as the Foundation of Political Community and What I'm learning of Trauma and Polyvagal Theory

I find myself pained by the darkness currently settling over the PNW. I left work at 4:30 yesterday and there was a shred of light still in the air. I left work at 5:00 today and it was essentially night... dark dark dark. It is December 3rd as I begin this writing. I have been reminding those around me that the shortest day of the year is about 17 days away. December 20th. After that we begin gaining light again, something like 3 minutes a day.

I have learned to track this movement in and out of the dark. Every year I forget what the depths of winter and heights of summer are like. Every year I lose something of myself, die a little, as winter comes along. "Now is the time that everything not necessary for surviving is dying away," a friend recently said to me. There are depths to this statement. I am also reminded of a lyric from one of my favorite songs by Moonface: "Quickfire, I tried to not go crazy, but the winter got inside me anyway." It happens every year and I don't know what to do other than to be sad, to cook food, to try and see others and care for myself.

Recently I attended a friendsgiving that I have been attending for many years. There were many people that I love and am happy to see. I had several conversations that revealed to me pain that others are in. The pain that I saw from my friends and acquaintances was different from the pain of winter: it was the pain of political turmoil and instability; the pain of people trying to look at a world that more obviously offers misery and misanthropy than anything else.

I have a complex relationship with words like optimism and pessimism, cynicism and realism, hope and dread. They are complex experiences.

I want to relay several of these conversations, as I think they are reasonable starting points for reflecting on the meaning of friendship in relationship to political instability,  and can help me perhaps unpack some of what I have been learning about contemporary trauma and physiology research.

A strange new direction in my thought is to put together much of my reading of classical political philosophy with what is going on in contemporary trauma research. Plato and polyvagal theory actually compliment one another quite well.

I spoke with a person that I have met only recently at this friendsgiving. He told me at some point that he was moving away from thinking about justice and morality. This naturally piqued my interest. I inquired. He told me that 'these things were primarily just human constructs,' and that 'human beings are just blips in terms of cosmic or geological time'. When we are gone these ideas will no longer have a life in the universe. These arguments were used principally in the name of self-soothing: it is painful to look at the world and to consider it rife with immoral and unjust suffering. I asked 'Do you think this is a good attitude for engaging responsibly in the present situation?' 'Of course not...' he said, or something similar. Again, these are arguments of self-soothing, of comforting oneself in the face of what might be useless suffering.

I spoke with another person, a friend, about her anxiety watching the country move towards the 2020 election cycle. It will, indeed, be a fucked up year full of liars lying in order to do more fucked up things. She was somewhat adamant that Trump will most likely be reelected, 'when has America not been on the edge of a precipice and not just gone right over it?' I was and am sympathetic to her general political outlook, but found this statement immoderate and mostly just not true. I brought up the passing of the New Deal, the founding of the American social safety net, and the election of Obama and the passing of the Affordable Care Act. She assented that these were steps in the right direction. We both agreed, however, that they were far from enough. America has no real viable political left, and we are left largely with centrist policies that call themselves 'liberal'. David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism recently clarified some of these issues for me.

What I was most struck by in this conversation was the anxiety that seized my friend as soon as we began this topic, and the accompanying extreme views about American politics. I share her pain, just like I share the pain of the previously mentioned acquaintance. But I want so badly to retain my peace of mind in the face of observing horrible things. This may be foolish or naive. I can't tell yet. But the anxiety seized my friend, pained her. I could see it in her face and in her body; I could feel it in my body. My reaction was to try and soothe her. I think I put a hand on her shoulder and told her as much. I think of John Gray's basic argument in The Soul of the Marionette: when political instability becomes endemic it is vital to work to retain some kind of inner peace, as it may be the only freedom left available to us. I said this to my friend with an immediate caveat: this type of peace or equanimity is largely a function of privilege. We are both white, and I am a white man. I am afforded peace because I am free from the more violent and overt forms of coercion that others in America experience. The police have never fucked with me, and I've never been seriously threatened by poverty, illness, or other woes that destroy others' lives.

Yet if we want to be politically engaged, if we want to understand what responsible action or thinking is, we cannot allow our bodies to be ravaged by the stress and horror that comes from observing the horrors around us. These things will ruin our bodies: panic attacks, intrusive thoughts and memories, elevated nervous systems... trauma is a crucial engine of the police state, and this includes vicarious traumatization of the sympathetic and concerned observer. I once heard Alton Brown speak openly of his hunch that America would be interested in food television as a way to escape the horrors of political spectacle.

I spoke with another friend that was in pain in regards to his professional decisions. This friend is a very good writer who for a brief time made a living teaching composition after his MFA. He now works in coding, computers, programming. His plan was to work in that world until he could manage do it for 20 hours or so a week, spending the rest of his time making, writing, working on things that really mattered. He said something like 'I really only feel good or my best when I am creating, writing, working on stuff like that.' I sympathized and empathized with what he was saying. I, too, am making a sacrifice in terms of how I make money. I, too, would like to spend a life writing, reading, and attempting to care for others. Becoming a therapist, or a community mental health 'clinician' is a compromise or sacrifice I am making because it gets me closest to the kind of life that I want to be living. This friend, and I, were experiencing the low-grade forms of coercion that afflict almost everyone in America. We all have to make money in order to not starve. Rent never stops being demanded. The labor must be sold, and only after can we turn to our work.

We are the lucky ones. I am currently working very intimately with the unlucky ones. The institutionally sanctioned role for helping, however, feels like a mask for larger unaddressed political problems. Poverty has indeed been pathologized, and I have become one of the 'experts' doling out 'treatment plans' to individuals whose needs are simultaneously so much simpler and so much more complex than my faux-sophisticated position pretends.

Yet I am finding that some of my learning in this new world is deepening my reflections on political things. In particular, what I have been learning of trauma, bodies, and nervous systems has given me new ways to reflect on the political problems that I have been thinking about for a while. In particular, I want to reflect more on a claim that Aristotle makes in the Nicomachean Ethics: That friendship is the foundation of any strong political community. I will be reading De Anima in the next few weeks, and Keir and I intend to read the Politics within the next six months or so. I will not be returning to the Ethics right now because I am not in the mood to deal with that kind of text right now.

These reflections will proceed from an idea stated above: that in order to be responsibly and politically engaged individuals it is necessary to retain a certain peace of mind that keeps us from being too physically and psychologically taxed by the terrible things we are exposing ourselves to. I want to frame this dilemma in terms of trauma and perhaps the notion of 'trauma stewardship' (which I am insufficiently learned on at this point).

The essence of what I want to say is this: If we are to stay relatively healthy while engaging in taxing or traumatizing work we need to have a well regulated nervous system. The best way to regulate our nervous system is through relationship. This means both relationship with ourselves and our own minds and bodies, and relationships with others. The model of relationship that is most conducive to this task is friendship. Friendship is thus vital to any healthy political community because politics necessarily involves the traumatization of the many at the hands of the machinations of the few and of the community as a whole. Friendship is the private form of healing that makes possible engagement with the necessarily traumatizing space of the public or political. For even the most basic facts of being a political animal means that we will be traumatized: filling roles, occupying space, and interacting with other animals. All of these things act on us, shape our bodies, and the intelligent nervous system is the primary way that we fit ourselves to these public situations.

This is going to be rough, as I don't have a handle on this stuff yet.

I have been reading some in contemporary research on trauma, physiology, and biophysics. I am out of my depth. Yet I find the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, and Peter Levine to be compelling stuff. Polyvagal theory is also something I have had exposure to professionally, as I wade my way into the strange and painful world of community mental health.

The thing that I find most promising about these various trauma researchers is the way they offer resources for understanding the body as a highly complex and intelligent organism that is constantly preoccupied with the question 'Am I safe?' The body, the nervous system, are constantly engaged with the environment, taking in information from all of our various senses, and making determinations about how safe we are in our current environment. It would be easy to say that the body is 'unconsciously' keeping track of these words. But I find this term insufficient for a few reasons. First, the unconscious is conceptualized as a mental phenomena as opposed to an embodied one. Second, these bodily processes are far more accessible to conscious awareness than a term like the 'unconscious' implies. The body is not a black box, and the workings of our organismic intelligence do not need to be opaque to us. We just need to learn to pay attention to our bodies in new ways.

It is not necessary to learn about biology in order to develop this type of bodily awareness. Gendlin's work on 'focusing' and implicit intricacy accomplish a similar result. But the biological research adds a layer to our understanding.

Polyvagal theory adds an interesting evolutionary element to this account of organismic intelligence. The vagus nerve is a core nervous system structure that is found in all vertebrates. It is the main source of control of the autonomic nervous system. There is an identifiable phylogenetic history to its development that corresponds to different survival strategies. In reptiles, the vagus nerve principally controls freezing mechanisms. Lizards and reptiles play dead as their principal defense. With mammals and other vertebrates the fight-flight mechanisms are introduced, as well as 'flopping' and other responses. With human beings and other mammals the vagus nerve is responsible for our ability to engage socially: it controls language, facial interpretation, head tilting, and all the subtle cues that go into our being social creatures.

We are composite beings, monsters, that possess all of these elements of our phylogenetic history within us. When we are traumatized, or even when we feel unsafe, the higher elements of the vagus nerve structures go offline. Trauma is 'unspeakable' because the language centers of the brain literally shut down when we feel unsafe. Additionally, if we feel unsafe, or have been repeatedly traumatized, we are more likely to interpret faces and voice tones as more hostile, we are less trusting of others. Trauma literally forces us to occupy older, more primitive places in our nervous systems, and it takes our consciousness there with it.

I have shared my interest in these questions with friends and they have told me it raises the specter of bio-physical determinism, that it threatens their sense of freedom, responsibility, or the 'autonomy of human affairs'. I have no such fear. I strongly suspect that there is a way for these insights into the nature of our nervous system to be completely compatible with a reasonable account of human 'freedom', or at least of responsible activity. I am displeased with how I'm formulating this right now. But somehow I feel that these insights about the body and its evolutionary history only serve to deepen my understanding of what it means to think about human life, about politics, about responsibility. Truthfully, I think of what Ta-Nehisi Coates says in Between the World and Me: Racial violence, violence of all kinds, happens to bodies. It is broken teeth and fractured bones, punctured skin and bruised organs. Violence is a nervous system that no longer knows how to engage with other beings; a nervous system, a poor body, that can no longer feel itself safe, but remains afraid, remains alert and aroused.

I am going to begin reading Aristotle's De Anima this weekend, and I hope that it will give me resources for conceptualizing these questions about bodies, minds, and souls in new ways.

Polyvagal theory also adds a deeper layer to attachment theory. The notion of weak, strong, insecure attachment circulates fairly widely. I never perceived the depth of attachment theory, however, until I read an article that claimed that it is really a theory of relational nervous system regulation. That is to say, the essence of attachment between children and parents, or between friends and lovers, is a matter of how our bodies and nervous systems relate to one another. When we are around another person our bodies organically understand and mirror how they are breathing, how their faces are expressing, how their bodies tell us about how they are feeling (See Iacoboni and Goldman on mirror neurons and simulation theory). When we notice that a partner or friend is uncomfortable, we see it in their breathing, and we feel it in our own breathing and our own heart rate.

Fortunately, we can develop strategies for regulating our bodies and nervous systems. Indeed, breathing and touch are the only direct connection we have to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve. Everything else is fully automatic: hormones, heart rate, digestion, so on. All of these things are beyond us; yet our body is responding and adapting at every moment.

As a therapist, it is crucial that I pay attention to my body, and that I regulate it while I am with a client. I am attending to their body; I see them become dysregulated; I see them begin to breath; begin to rock back and forth; begin to look away. I feel it in my body. I feel my ability to listen carefully slipping away; my body is telling me to get out, that we are unsafe. I recognize this. I take a deep breath; I let it out slowly. I feel into my body, I bring it back to the moment. I return to the moment, and try to engage. Crucially, I keep myself regulated so as to provide them a point of relational regulation. I have to keep my nervous system, my body, in check, to give them the opportunity to regulate themselves in relation to me.

This is the connection I want to make between friendship, bodies, and political life. Modern political institutions have become exceedingly good at wielding trauma as a means of social control. Trauma is something that makes real changes to bodies and literally affects the way we are able to engage in the world. Friendship, as a process of regulating and caring for our bodies and nervous systems in relation to others, has to be a vital part of engaging responsibly with the public domain. Without the private nourishment of friendship we are left bare to the wicked winds of the public sphere.

Certain forms of public traumatization are obvious: the police state and its constant afflicting of communities of color; poverty and the ongoing fear and uncertainty of food, shelter, and safety. These are easy to see. What I also want myself and others to be aware of are the minor traumas that accompany the occupation of any social role. Because trauma is not an isolated event, but rather an extreme version of what everyone experiences every day: our intelligent bodies fit ourselves to situations; our intelligent bodies shape themselves into whatever shapes they need to be in order to survive. Psychosis, as a response to trauma, is deeply intelligent: the body finds a way to continue living when the world is intolerable; it finds another place. Neuroses, so-called mental illness, these things are also tremendously intelligent responses to painful and intolerable situations.

The public sphere will always shape us. Taking shape, filling roles is the stuff of political life. Political order makes itself by ordering bodies, to be here, to do this, to say that. These things show up in the nervous system. Every time I start a new job I have bizarre and stressful dreams. Last night I dreamt that I was crushing the skulls of kittens. I had been riding on a train with a former classmate, and somehow I knew these kittens were evil. I stomped on their heads. Then I was in the water, in the middle of the night, with a new coworker, trying desperately to avoid a menacing, violent presence in the water. I was terrified.

This is the necessary stress of my body responding to a new shape that is being imposed on me. I am one of the lucky ones in that I have options. I chose to take a job in forensic community mental health. I wanted to. Yet I am choosing among a limited number of options. There is an element of coercion and violence to all social life. Society demands that we acquire shape; it hurts to acquire shape; and our poor bodies are responsible for acquiring this shape. What does it mean to be flexible? What does it mean to find grace in the occupation of a social role? What does it mean to assent, willingly, to acquiring shape, to filling a role?

The poor, those struggling, the people I'm working with on a daily basis, do not have options. They are being shaped in explicitly and extremely violent ways. The violence or coercion I am afflicted with is more subtle.

The violence of capitalism is subtle. It claims it assures freedom. Nonsense. To be a political animal is to not to be free, but to be bound.

Friendship is, hopefully, a private space in which the violence of conforming to social roles can be mitigated. 'Friend' is also a kind of role. But it is a role that is closest to not being a role than perhaps any role. Friendship, in this way, is transpolitical: it stands outside the normal coercive pressures endemic to life as a political animal. I have ideas about therapy as a kind of friendship, the therapeutic space as a kind of transpolitical space. I wrote my graduate school integration paper about this question.

At that Friendsgiving I was watching my friends grapple with the sacrifices necessary to fitting into a world in which we are condemned to relation, to being political by nature. We can try to sacrifice the notions of justice and morality, trying to buy ourselves a peace of mind. We can sacrifice our own bodies, our sense of hope, and be racked by the anxiety of the ongoing political spectacle. We can sacrifice our time and our deepest desires to make our livelihood. None shall be free of sacrifice.

But hopefully we can all find places in which we find not only sacrifices, but duties, or sacrifices that we are happy to make. Friendship is perhaps such a place. Friendship can perhaps be a space in which we can nurture and nourish one another, care for eachother's s bodies, regulate each other's nervous systems, love one another.

Love shows itself in the way the nervous system works. Unless we feel fundamentally safe, i.e. loved, the higher portions of the brain go offline. Philosophy is impossible without friendship. Genuine engagement with the fundamentally unsafe world of politics is impossible without pain, trauma. We need to find ways to feed those portions of the soul as we wade out into public life in full awareness that they will be wounded and threatened.

Relationality and Rhetoric: Thoughts on Therapeutic Space, Conformity, and Irony

I am generally a 'relationally' oriented therapist and person.

Therapeutically, I think that the relationship with a therapist and others is the principal source of healing. Similarly, trauma, neurosis, psychosis, and suffering generally emerge from our relationships with others, places, things, and ourselves. Recently I tried to ask someone what led to them using substances again and they said "It's always persons, places, and things." This is a true statement.

As a person, I think that the reality of individuality (and there is reality to it) is less real than the fundamental fact of relationship. We are in relation, originally and always. We are not born alone, and we often don't die alone, despite what I may have been taught as a child. Individuality is an abstraction from our originally related condition, and it is unintelligible apart from this OG relationality.

One thing I have been experiencing in these early days of a therapist is how differently I speak based on the person and the situation. I find myself saying to one client that the notion of 'motivation' is bullshit. The next hour I may be talking to a person about finding genuine or real motivation for their life. In each case these words, of course, mean different things--they are connected to a different situation, a different body, a different network of relationships, and therefore the words possess a different depth in spite of their surface similarity.

In the first case, the notion of 'motivation' was being wielded in relation to friends and family members offering hollow advice about 'getting things done' and 'finding a fire in your belly'. The word in that context was spoken with little feeling, in a 'disembodied' fashion, as my old therapist used to say to me. In the second case, someone may be speaking about their genuine desire to reach out to others, or a new found desire to work hard, 'to have this moment be one where I really started working hard on where I want to be.' This is real, embodied, motivation.

Here I am relying on Eugene Gendlin's notion of 'experiential intricacy'. Gendlin, a philosopher and therapist, developed a compelling form of somatic work that he called 'focusing'. It is the somatic form of psychotherapy that I was introduced to in graduate school and that I have been most deeply affected by. To oversimplify, on Gendlin's account, words can be used in two distinct ways: one in which they make contact with our embodied or experiential 'felt-sense' of a situation, and another in which they are used as empty abstractions that feel disconnected from the embodied depth of our lives.  I will call this embodied and disembodied speech, respectively.

These two ways of using words both appear often in therapy.

Disembodied speech relies on phrases like 'Oh, I must be feeling this way because of X,' or 'I don't know what's wrong with me, I just can't seem to pull myself out of this,' or 'I guess I'm just crazy of weak or something.' These words here, 'must' and 'just', are indicative of a type of speech that is spoken from a distance, chastising the self as if from above or without. 'If I could only be like my sibling and snap out of this...'

Embodied speech, on the other hand, shows itself most clearly in a pattern of deepening, correcting, and refining the words we use to speak. 'There's something going on with all this... it's like I'm stuck.' Oh, you feel stuck. 'Well, stuck... sure... but it's more like I'm in a vat of honey and I can't move my limbs..." Oh, sticky, honey... 'Sure, its kind of like that... but its really more like...' This is a somewhat characteristic of a certain type of speech in therapy. In this case speech is taking place in direct relation with something else, a whole slew of embodied feelings and experiences that are guiding the speech in its unfolding. We are deferring to our bodies and the way that our feelings about the situation are showing up there.

I would imagine all of us know the feeling of searching for and finding the right word for an experience we are having. 'Oh, yes, I am feeling shame...' How do we know when we've found the right word? What are we checking the words against when we find that they are lacking or fitting? Gendlin's wager, and one that I agree with, is that we are checking the words against our 'bodily felt-sense' of a situation. a 'bodily felt-sense' is not a flimsy intuitive understanding: it is a comprehensive form of embodied organismic intelligence. 'My body knows more than I can form with my brain,' goes a song that I quite like.

These two types of speech, disembodied and embodied, can help explain why I speak differently to different people in different times and places. The meaning of the words does not live in a disembodied space, like some timeless form that never changes. The words mean different things depending on who is saying them and when they are saying them and who they are saying them to.

Thus I can go from one session where I talk about what bullshit 'motivation' is, to the next and talk about the importance of finding genuine motivation. In each case I am using the words that allow me to come into fuller contact with the person's lived experience of their life and their problems.

These two forms of speech, embodied and disembodied, also map onto two different understandings of the notion of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a notion I have become increasingly interested in, partly because of my reading of Plato, partly because of my reading of Emmanuel Levinas. My training as a psychotherapist has deepened my interest in that I speak differently to every client I encounter, sometimes using the same words in highly distinct ways in different sessions. With one client I may tell them that I have no wisdom because I feel that they are not giving themselves enough credit and being overly deferential to me; with another I may adopt a tone of competence and expertise because I sense that they are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of our encounter.

The two forms of rhetoric I will refer to as spurious rhetoric and genuine rhetoric. Spurious rhetoric is a description of rhetoric I see in Levinas, and one that maps onto disembodied speech. Genuine rhetoric is the Socratic understanding of rhetoric, and it maps onto embodied speech.

Levinas argues in Totality and Infinity that rhetoric is chiefly a form of violence. Rhetoric is a form of speech that does not seek to meet the other exactly as they are, that does not allow the face of the other to radically disrupt my subjectivity. Rhetoric, on the contrary, 'solicits the yes' of the other. Rhetoric, for Levinas, is fundamentally about persuasion, or better put, coercion. Levinas likely would have agreed with the critics of motivational interviewing that claimed the practice is subtly manipulative and uses 'rhetorical' skill to guide the client to a place that the therapist already knows is best ahead of time. Indeed, Levinas does grant that rhetoric in this sense is a form of dialogue, but it is violence nonetheless.

I write my paper in the SU Levinas seminar on his understanding of rhetoric, and argued that it is fundamentally immoderate. It misses something about the reality of our political situation, the fact that different people need to hear different things in different ways at different times. Rhetoric is less like manipulation, and more like tact. I think it undeniable that tact is one of the central skills a therapist needs, especially when we consider its relation to words like 'tactile', 'handling', 'being in touch'. All of these words are related. If you care, you can find that paper here.

Levinas, then, argues for what I would call spurious rhetoric, in which rhetoric is understood principally as manipulation, coercion, persuasion, and violence.

Socrates, on the other hand, is a practitioner of what I am calling genuine rhetoric. Genuine rhetoric is not about persuasion, but about tact, about relationship. Socrates speaks differently every single person he talks to, and the same arguments rarely repeat themselves in the Platonic dialogues. In fact, sometimes the dialogues radically contradict one another. In the Symposium, for example, Socrates praises Eros and identifies it as the principle source of the philosopher's ongoing desire for knowledge of the unchanging things. In the Republic, by contrast, Eros is identified as the main feature of the tyrannical soul: a desire to know and to control all. Both of these things are true. There is something tyrannical in philosophy, in the erotic desire to know. Mark Lilla explicates this problem well in The Reckless Mind. But Eros is also a vital force for philosophy. Moderation is thus crucial to the proper engagement with philosophical Eros.

It is moderation, too, that drives Socrates to say different things to different interlocutors. Indeed, it is a crucial point that Socrates is speaking to very different audiences when he makes these seemingly contradictory statements about Eros. In the Symposium he speaks in private to a group of friends who are attempting to understand the meaning of Eros in the wake of a poetic competition. In the Republic he speaks in a quasi-public environment with two politically ambitious young men. Socrates' speech changes  because he is moderating himself and his speech based on the political conditions of the moment. The Symposium, as a private conversation, is largely safe, and there is little danger that his praise of Eros will produce disastrous consequences. In the Republic, however, he needs to moderate his account of Eros because there is a danger that these two young men will be seduced by a more positive account of Eros. His goal is to guide them towards the middle path.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics famously praises the notion of the golden mean, or the middle path. Aristotle also argues that it may be necessary to over-correct if one wants to achieve the middle path. I, for example, am excessively fearful, so it may be wise for me to act boldly, bravely, even brashly. In doing so, I may end up closer to the desired middle path. Someone who is wrathful, by contrast, may need to over correct in the opposite direction.

Socratic rhetoric is a good example of this way of over-correcting so as to arrive at the middle path. What Socrates says in each dialogue to each interlocutor cannot be taken as the simple truth of Plato or Socrates teaching. Socrates speech is too politically conditioned, too tactful, too rhetorically sophisticated, for any of the teachings to be abstracted, generalized, and held up as the Platonic or Socratic teaching. We only ever get Socrates speaking in particular situations to particular interlocutors with particular political pressures that he must conform to. That Socrates practiced philosophy for 70 years before he was ultimately murdered by the Athenian community should cue us into the fact that he was a skilled rhetorical thinker who knew the proper place of conformity.

I identify far more with Socrates rather than Levinas on this question of rhetoric. When I speak differently to different clients I am not somehow betraying them or myself: I am responding to the demands of the moment, speaking to a particular person in the particular way that will allow them to hear the things that I am trying to communicate or explore with them.

This also does not imply any kind of relativism. I remain convinced that nature, or a stable external order, is real. There is 'a way things are'. It just so happens that this universal knowledge is only ever accessible through particular situations. The distortions of the particular moment are the only way we ever arrive at any type of universal understanding, but that universal understanding is in principle unchanging. Thus when Socrates implores his interlocutors to 'not absent from the logos, but to follow it wherever it leads us,' he is simultaneously affirming the two claims I am making here: First, that there is a logos that can show itself through rational inquiry, the is a nature, or an order, to this place. And second, that this logos, or nature cannot be pursued in abstract or general terms, but only in particular dialogues with particular interlocutors or in particular situations. Nature only shows itself through the distortions of our political situation.

My friend Keir believes that this is of the essence of Platonic metaphysics or ontology. Plato seems keenly aware that any pursuit of the question 'how things are' must necessarily traverse the political situation of 'how things seem to us. Thus Strauss, in his correspondence with Gadamer, draws attention to the distinct between 'first by nature' and 'first for us.' Socrates knows that there is no way of accessing what is first by nature except by navigating what is first for us. That means that the political conditions, the attitudes of the particular interlocutor, must be negotiated carefully in order to engage them in a conversation where the logos of nature can show itself.

Rhetoric is thus an indispensable skill in the attempt to speak about the truth of things with different people in different places. It is a baseline reality for us as political animals: prejudices always come first, and we must know how to skillfully navigate these prejudices if we ever want to make any philosophical or scientific headway. Socrates knows that he must conform to the standards of the community and of each situation if he is to philosophize. He knows that he must conform to the attitudes and possibilities of the individual in front of them if he is to successfully engage them in shared pursuit of the universal logos of nature.

It is this notion of conformity that perhaps separates Socrates and Levinas. Levinas whole project in Totality and Infinity excludes our political nature. It, instead, posits a primordial pre-political space in which two human beings encounter one another, unencumbered by the prejudices of the community. In such a space, where two individuals meet one another with no one else around and with no prior commitments, we would be able to have such an honest, direct, face-to-face encounter. Levinas admits, however, that this is an instructive fiction: “The description of enjoyment as it has been conducted to this point assuredly does not render the concrete man. In reality man has already the idea of infinity, that is, lives in society and represents things to himself" (139, my emphasis). It is this fiction of the two individuals encountering one another in the world that allows Levinas to denigrate rhetoric as violence.

The concrete human being is already in the grips of prejudices, already has opinions and commitments that generally interfere with, and at least structure, the process of philosophical inquiry. Socrates, having a highly politicized view of the human animal (as he should), is deeply attuned to the role of conformity in human affairs. Belonging, relation, is an original condition for us. We are not individuals that encounter one another in the open field. We are political animals that come to awareness of ourselves and others in light of the prejudices of the family and community. Rhetoric, then, for Socrates and for me, is simply an indispensable element of engaging others in philosophic or therapeutic speech. Because every person has different prejudices, different starting points, they must be spoken to differently. Again, this does not imply relativism of the ultimate or natural things. It only identifies the necessary problems that are present in all attempts to speak seriously about serious things. Perhaps this is why Levinas has very little to say about what philosophy is in Totality and Infinity. Levinas doesn't seem to think much about conformity.

This is the bulk of what I want to say. But I want to close with a few thoughts on irony as it relates to rhetoric.

I recently read the first lecture in Jonathan Lear's book A Case for Irony. It is one of the  most impressive things I have read in some time. As Keir said when I shared a passage, 'This guy reads like he is eavesdropping on our conversations. Indeed. It is making it clear to me that irony is the principal device of Socratic rhetoric, and the key to his playful earnestness.

For Lear, irony is not a practice of insincerity, but a necessary feature of human experience, and one that is required for any kind of earnestness or seriousness. Irony shows itself most clearly in tautological questions. He uses Kierkegaard as an example: "In all of Christendom, are there any Chritians?" he asks. THe meaning of this, Lear argues, is that Christendom is this institutional framework, a set of social roles, that are supposed to ensure the flourishing of Christian individuals. We all know, however, that just because you fill a role meant for a purpose doesn't mean you live up to that purpose. 

You can work as a doctor or therapist, for example, and not actually be very good at being a doctor or a therapist. You fill the role of 'healer', but fail to do any real healing. Thus, I can ask 'Among the therapists, are there any therapists?' By which I mean, of all the people socially designated as healers, are any of them actually healers? 

This, for Lear, is the core of irony: it is a type of disjunction that exists between the socially designated roles and the chief ideas that those roles are formed in relation to. In this sense, irony is a form of uncanniness: the familiar is suddenly rendered unfamiliar. But, crucially, it is not an ordinary kind of uncanniness, but an erotic uncanniness: when we find ourselves confused about these things, we still find ourselves directed, oriented, or longing for truth and understanding. When I ask, 'among the therapists, are there any therapists?' I am committed to the idea of being a therapist, of being a healing person. Yet I am keenly aware that all that goes into the idea of 'therapist' as a socially constituted role (i.e. the professional degree, the ability to say things like CBT, DBT, so on, or the badge that allows me into clinics) are not sufficient to the task of being a healing person.

Socratic rhetoric relies fundamentally on this kind of irony as erotic uncanniness. Socrates is constantly trying to find a way to relate to his interlocutor so that they can genuinely share in the inquiry into the nature of things. The Platonic dialogues often explore questions of 'What is X?'. The interlocutors, of course, have to traverse the world of receive opinion, because almost never are we asking questions which we are radically unfamiliar with. We generally have some opinion or idea about what a thing is. But Socratic rhetoric functions so as to prompt these experiences of erotic uncanniness in his interlocutors. Only by befuddling, dislocating, disorienting them can we begin to transcend received opinion and really wonder, what the hell do we mean by these words? When we live ironically, we can comfortably inhabit social roles (therapist) and still wonder about the depth of those roles (what the hell is a therapist, anyway?) without ever abandoning our commitment or desire to be what it is we are trying to understand. Irony, in this sense, is the most honest form of engagement that I can imagine.

This account of rhetoric and irony needs to be thought in relation to the problem of disembodied v. embodied speech discussed above. Rhetoric as violence belongs to the domain of disembodied speech; it is shallow, hollow, and dishonest. Rhetoric as ironic engagement in pursuit of the shared logos is embodied speech.

It is principally in our bodies that we detect these uncanny moments: for in the midst of the uncanny the words fall away, we don't know what to say. But we can feel it. Among all the therapists, are there any therapists? The question conjures such feelings in my chest. I have to breath, sit, wonder, feel, reflect. Socrates wants to commune with others in pursuit of the shared logos; he wants to join. This joining is facilitated by speech but permeates the living body, which is the living logos of the world.

The depths of embodied speech point precisely to these questions of relation, rhetoric, conformity, and irony. I hope I have made some sense of them here. I have been helped by this writing.

Images of Living Well: Artist and Philosopher, Creation and Nature

These days I work as a therapist. It is a new role for me, but one I feel well suited to.

Therapists are concerned with helping others live better lives. Therapists are then necessarily involved in the question of what it means to live well. The question of what it means to live well, as a human being, is a general or universal question, not a simply particular question. Some folks would assert that living well, or happiness, is a radically subjective phenomena: there are, allegedly, as many good lives as there are individuals. I am not persuaded by this claim. I think there are many general or universal things that can be said about what it means to live well.

Here I am concerned principally with two images or ideas of the good life: the artist and the philosopher. In modern philosophy the image of the artist has become more and more predominant over that of the philosopher. Ancient philosophy, on the other hand, had an ambivalent relation to artists or 'poets' (makers in the broadest sense). The artist is a being of creation; the philosopher is a being that pursues the truth of nature.

The tradition of psychotherapy that I was trained in, existential-phenomenological psychology, certainly favors the image of the artist over the philosopher. In favoring the artist, EP psychology is following a general thrust of modernity that finds intense and hyperbolic expression in the major existential writers: Sartre and Camus. Their writings were deeply indebted to perhaps the wellspring of existential thought: Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is a much more powerful thinker than either Sartre or Camus. His relationship to art, poetry, and the question of the good life is far more complex and subtle than theirs. I am still working on thinking through his writing, and still reading more of him. Camus devolves into ridiculous statements about 'the artist giving the void its colors,'  and living your entire life as an act of rebellion. As if I don't have to go to work in order to not starve. Sartre lauds a silly form of radical freedom in which I necessarily strive after godlike control. That the human being necessarily reaches toward the divine I do not contest. But I do not believe that hubris is a necessary condition of a human life. Humility, piety, and faith are all real and important possibilities for our lives.

Even Heidegger, however, ends up abandoning 'philosophy' or 'metaphysics' in favor of a kind of 'poetic dwelling.' Again, Heidegger's thought is incredibly subtle. But he still belongs to this camp that gradually  moves away from the image of the philosopher and replaces it with the artist.

There is something troubling to me in this lauding of art, or creation, as the highest good. I often felt frustrated by signs I saw around capitol hill, Seattle, that said "Fucking Make Art!" or bumper stickers that say "Earth without Art is just Eh." I say this as someone highly involved with the making of 'artistic' things. I have been painting seriously for the last year and a half. I have been writing poetry, stories, and essays more or less organically for the last 10 years.  My father is a prolific multimedia artist. I could call myself an artist if I wanted to. But it is unclear to me what it means to be 'an artist'. I also don't really call myself a writer. I talk to my friends that I read and write with about this. They much more readily call themselves 'writers.' I prefer to call myself a maker or a thinker or something like that. I would call myself a philosopher but I'm not that vain and I regard that term principally as an honorific. I do not claim it for myself and hopefully never will. I am still too busy trying to understand what philosophy even is.

What is it about the modern world that has led to the image of the artist being one of the principal images of the good life? What is it about 'creativity', about 'freedom', about 'passion' that we all find so appealing? I of course admit that freedom is good, but not unqualifiedly good. Freedom to do what? To laud freedom in an unqualified fashion is to laud the freedom of the capitalist to exploit their workers just as it is to laud the ability of the worker to make art.

I want to explore the idea that the modern emphasis on creativity, and the modern valorizing of the artist, is connected to the fundamentally theological or biblical character of modernity. The early modern founders, as I have understood them,  were attempting to bring about transformations in the fundamental structure of society. Their chief target was the Catholic church. In order to contest the rule of the church, the alleged divine authority of the pope and his priests, the notion of God underwent some sort of transformation. The precise nature of this transformation is not yet clear to me. It is either a rebellion against the idea of God, a failure of the idea of God, a modification of the idea of God, or something like this. In any case, modernity, or the Enlightenment, was an attempt to do away with the fundamentally theocratic character of politics and to found governments solely on human reason. The idea of God, however, did not disappear: it became humanized.

The core of modernity, in other words, is an attempt for human beings to become godlike in some sense. In my last post I spoke of Feuerbach's explicit claim that the task of modernity was to recognize that what we had previously called God was really a part of humans that we had misidentified. Indeed, something like this is the ultimate conclusion of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which Keir and I spent an agonizing 8 months going through together. Fabulous. I also noted that Descartes' claim that the modern natural sciences will make us 'masters and possessors of nature' is expressedly theological. Descartes understood that the sciences were about control, and that the biblical god was the model for this spirit of mastery or sovereignty. The modern natural sciences then ought to be understood principally as a tool for the waging of a philosophical war against the catholic church.

The most significant feature of the inception of the modern natural sciences is that the word nature undergoes significant modifications. Caroline Merchant, a brilliant historian, Leo Strauss, and many others, have helped me see that modernity is in part a shift from a teleological (or organismic) conception of nature to a mechanistic conception of nature. Defining nature as a machine, Merchant argues, frees human beings from moral imperatives and restraints that existed in an organismic or teleological account of nature. For if nature is an organism, or if goodness is natural, then science, as an attempt to think and act rationally, must defer to natural forms of goodness. When nature is defined as a machine, however, it is free to be manipulated and dominated. We can do what we please to a nature that is fundamentally a machine: human action is fundamentally liberated by any constraints imposed upon it by a theoretical order. The only limits of human action are self-imposed limits. The human being is essentially a god or can become godlike.

Indeed, the work of Richard Kennington, Paul Rahe, and Robert Roecklein has convinced me that the early modern founders were keenly aware of the political import of the new mechanistic sciences. Machiavelli actively looked towards ancient forms of materialism and Spinoza spoke openly of his attack on teleology. Both of these men were considered dangerous and heretical thinkers during their time and far beyond. That they were so involved with these questions about the meaning of nature should cue us into something strange. Through the mechanistic sciences human beings have indeed achieved profound mastery over the natural world, ourselves included. Transhumanist writers now speak openly of becoming technologically immortal.

Because the modern redefinition of nature was principally meant to utilize an attack on the catholic church, certain elements of the biblical tradition became integrated into this project. I am proposing that the notion of 'creation' was co-opted from the biblical tradition and made a major object of the modern natural sciences. Indeed, Bacon envisioned 'the arts' (i.e. the technical sciences) as providing human beings with fantastic new inventions or creations. He wrote in The New Atlantis, his utopian novel, of new species of plants and animals, never before seen, that could be created by the new physical sciences. Descartes wrote, similarly, of an 'infinity of devices' that would now be possible.

The notion of 'creation' is a biblical notion. I have been reading the first 15-20 pages of Genesis recently. I have never read it before. It is amazing, at 32, to be going through a book, no, the book, that shaped the Western world. The status of god as a creator, moreover, is quite strange. I am hung up on what it would mean for god to have knowledge of the things he created. If he created them, how can he have knowledge of them? Knowledge, to me, implies a stable type of understanding. We can know something because it exists in a capacity beyond us. If God made it, then can't he unmake it and make it into something new? Then doesn't that thing not have a nature outside of god's having created it? Then God only knows himself, not the things he makes. I don't know what to make of it.

The modern natural sciences, which were expressly theological in the early- and mid-modern writers, took over this fundamentally 'creative' character of god. We, the human being, was now the site of creation and creativity.

I am suggesting that the exaggerated notion of creation and creativity, and the lauding of the artist, is connected at some level to the fundamentally biblical character of the modern natural sciences. The reason that Sartre and Camus are able to speak so flippantly and comically of the radical freedom and creativity of the human being is because the modern project has been about cultivating a godlike stance for the human being. Sartre and Camus are full of these kinds of theological images. But they don't seem to perceive the link between their hubristic claims and the fundamentally hubristic character of the modern project as an outgrowth of biblical consciousness.

I do not believe that the image of the artist is sufficient for the question of what it means to live well. The good life is not necessarily the creative life, although a good life will probably involve 'making' things in some capacity. But making and creating feel quite different to me. So far, in my work as a therapist, I do not find anyone I am talking with to be a radically free being. We are sacrificial beings. We make compromises. We are shaped and coerced by institutions. We are frail and stand in need of others. We are anything but gods.

I am more interested in the image of the philosopher as opposed to the image of the artist. The philosopher, as I said above, stands principally in relation to nature, not creation. The bible knows no word for nature; creation is the closest equivalent. Nature here must be understood in the organismic or teleological sense outlined above: nature is a place in which natural ends exist; in which species and individuals have forms of goodness that are specific to them. The nature of a being, then, is identical to what is good for that being. The human being, being a political animal by nature, thus is coeval with the question of the good or best political order.

This concept of nature as teleological makes the fundamentally creative conception of the human  being impossible. Because nature is a nature of natural ends it is not up to us what is good for us. There is a larger, theoretical order that we are beholden to. Our task is to rectify our ignorance of that external order by pursuing knowledge of it.

In pursuing knowledge of nature we are attempting to overcome our original way of understanding: the opinions of the political community. This is why for Plato and Aristotle the pursuit of 'natural' knowledge is always pursued in contradistinction to 'conventional' knowledge. We are born in the cave, witnessing the shadows of the artifacts, fooled into thinking that the illusions and prejudices of the community are simply 'how things are'. Philosophy is the desire to know nature rather than the illusions of the cave; philosophy is the desire to ascend from conventional opinion to knowledge of nature. This is not a creative act. It is an act of longing; a pursuit of something that we piously and faithfully relate to. Socratic piety is perhaps the faith to continue pursuing nature despite the fact that all of our inquires continue to land us back in the world of human opinion and construction. We must have faith that there is 'a way things are'. Asserting the alternative, that there is no 'way things are' strikes me as absurd, dangerous, and driven by a spirit of control.

Our bodies will break down and we will die. If that isn't proof to you that there is an order greater then us, then I don't know how to speak to you. Perhaps the fragility of your body and the needfulness of your soul are seen as shameful to you.

I have never been so happy to acknowledge my weakness and to revel in the knowledge that I am beholden to so much beyond myself.

The freedom of the artist, of godlike creativity, is indeed alluring. But the pursuit of nature, the life of philosophy, offers its own kind of freedom. It is not always a practical freedom, but a freedom of mind and spirit: a theoretical freedom. To be in pursuit of nature is to know that the conventions that structure life, the roles and rules, are not 'natural', but incidental. That I am a therapist is a contingent fact: had I been born two hundred years ago rather than in 1987 I would not be a therapist. I would need to be something else because a totally different set of conventional structures would prevail. But because I am aware of the contingent, historical, or constructed elements of my life, I am able to ask myself what is natural in them, what I can do to become more human, in the broadest sense of that term. I must participate in capitalism. But I am free to wonder what in the midst of these creations is more than merely created.

Healing is a natural phenomena; the role of therapist is not. Justice is a natural phenomena; the injustices of capitalism are not. Friendship is a natural phenomena; Facebook and Instagram are not. I am only free to pursue these questions about nature because they show themselves to me through conventions.

The role, the constructed social part, is my only avenue to nature. I have no choice but to travel through artifice to try and understand what it might mean to be natural. We are never free from convention. We are never free from our roles. The philosopher, in being in pursuit of nature, is free from the domination of laws, customs, and illusions that are the fundamental human creations.

There is no problem being in the cave. It is okay to have to occupy roles. But do not think that the roles are all that exist.

There is something otherwise than creation. It is called nature. And it only shows itself through the created, made, or constructed.

The image of the artist will not do. We do not create all of this. The image of the philosopher offers something different; a sense of deference to things beyond us.

Isn't it a relief, knowing that this isn't all up to you? Isn't it comforting to think that we may be able to discover what is good for us?

I cannot bear the work of the gods. I am too weak; too wounded; too needful. I am not sorry.

I suspect that the people I will be working with and speaking to as a therapist also will not be able to handle the work of the gods. They, too, are weak and needful.

Perhaps I can work with them to discover what, by nature, is good for them, or me, or us.

Reading Feuerbach, Where I'm At, More Traces

I recently had the pleasure of reading a very peculiar, small, old book, Ludwig Feuerbach's 1843 piece Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. I read it with one of my closest friends and my intellectual collaborator, Keir. Feuerbach is often framed as a transitional figure between Hegel and Marx. He was one of the pivotal rallying points of the 'Left Hegelians' or 'Young Hegelians'. I put these words in quotes because I don't understand this period of intellectual history deeply enough to evaluate the significance or legitimacy of these labels. In any case, Keir and I became concerned with Feuerbach because Keir is currently working on a dissertation on Marx. We are trying to get a handle on this period, what Marx was dealing with. I say 'we' because I feel thoroughly invested in Keir's dissertation, as I regard it as part of a larger joint intellectual project that can be crudely construed as 'leftist Straussianism'. We, in other words, are attempting to rebel against probably the most intellectually significant figure of our young intellectual lives: Leo Strauss. We find Strauss' conservatism both distasteful and misguided. I say nothing of the crude students who bastardized,  distorted, and capitalized on Strauss' already objectionable conservatism.

Feuerbach's text opens in alarming fashion: "The task of the modern era," he writes, "was the realization and humanization of God--the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology." I was pleased to see Feuerbach being so frank about the theological core of modernity. I recently completed an integration paper where I argued that modernity was always a project of mastery, one that took aspirations to god-like control as its chief goal. At this point it is too easy to talk about Descartes' claim that natural science will make us like 'masters and possessors of nature'. Indeed, the first section of the book is an explication of the way in which Descartes and Spinoza laid the groundwork for the theological ambitions of modernity. My recent encounters with the bizarre and provocative work of Brayton Polka has given me similar insights. The bible, Polka argues, offered Descartes, Spinoza, and modernity broadly, a model of sovereignty, mastery, that persists to this day. The core of modernity, in other words, is a theological-political. This, at least, is something that I think Strauss was correct about.

I applied this framework to twentieth century psychology and psychotherapy. I argued that many of the major forms of psychology still basically conceptualized themselves as projects of mastery. This is obviously true of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism; but I believe it is also true of Carl Rogers' humanistic psychology and existential psychology broadly. I was not surprised to see Skinner speak flippantly of 'playing god' in Walden Two, nor was I shocked to see that Beyond Freedom & Dignity ends with nearly explicit advocacy for the project of transhumanism. I also wasn't surprised to see that Sartre, Heidegger, Levinas, Rollo May, and other in the existential-phenomenological camp succumb to theological immoderation. I was, however, shocked to see that Rogers argue that an authentic organismic being is a power more commanding then the dictates of gods and governments alike. Rogers book on 'personal power' ends up looking an awful lot like the Nietzsche's will to power, and his organismic, authentic individual like Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Carl Rogers, the closet Nietzschean. I can hear the distant laughter.

Thank god that Feuerbach is here to show me that the theological immoderation of modernity is not incidental. Feuerbach knew it and he said it plain as day.

The second portion of the book is an extended critique of Hegel as the pinnacle of modern philosophy and science. He takes Hegel to task for ultimately upholding a radical diremption between thinking and being. Feuerbach, in the third portion of the book, offers a possible unity of thinking and being through his conception of materialism, which he also calls humanism, naturalism, and empiricism. Feuerbach seems to be radically conflating many things that ought to be kept distinct. He ends up advocating for a consensual model of truth, and making confusing arguments about the ultimate unity of love and empiricism. Buber apparently took him seriously in this regard, and there is much to take seriously.

As I said to Keir, however, I do not believe this text to be worthy of deep, serious study. There are contradictions in it. Feuerbach was not so powerful of a thinker that the apparent contradictions are solved at a deeper level. There are problems. I may sort it out at some point.

But for now, Feuerbach has done me an invaluable service. He has shown me that many understood the core of modernity to be fundamentally theological. I was not, in other words, off when I pointed to the theological and masterful elements of contemporary psychology. They are part and parcel with modernity. This becomes perhaps more compelling in light of the way that American psychologists learned extensively from German laboratory psychologists in the late nineteenth century; or from the fact that the American university system absorbed large amounts of German intellectual emigrees. As Bloom and Collingwood both noted, there is a profound connection between our present situation and the thought of German speaking peoples.

My current intellectual task is to compress my 161 page integration paper into a 15-25 page publishable piece. This will be my first genuine effort at publishing something. I was encouraged to undertake this project by my professor that supervised the writing of the integration paper. I am tremendously flattered by her suggestion, as I regard her as the best teacher I had at SU, and one of the most interesting and intelligent people I've had the joy to meet.

I want to return to this blog, to begin to leave traces here. I need to move deeper into my thinking. I need to move deeper into my writing, again. I want to be careful, though. I used to run from myself by writing. My stomach feels empty and anxious as I acknowledge this. But right now I have many more things happening. I have a budding career in mental health; I am working very hard on my painting; I am taking serious care of my body and soul; I am working on healing from the things that have hurt me. It is important that I write. I must write.

Traces

I used to love blogging because I loved leaving traces of my life. I said it below: I throw documents over my shoulder and I continue down my path.

I got my first tattoo yesterday. That is not a document that I can throw over my shoulder. It is a document that is literally on my right thigh.

I had an image in mind for several years. It spoke to my thinking, spoke to many of my concerns. Now it is on my body. Last night, as I fell asleep with my leg wrapped in saran wrap, I thought to myself: "I no longer understand what this image means."

Perhaps someday I'll understand again.

Listening to Kacey Musgraves after Reading Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer

I'm fond of pop music. Recently, I have been taken with Kacey Musgraves' new record 'Golden Hour'. One reviewer said that she 'sings simply about the world as if she's the first person to notice, and you're the first one she's telling.' This is an apt statement. One of my favorite songs on the record, 'Oh, What a World', strikes that difficult balance between wonder and naivete. 

As I listened to the record today I was struck by a connection between her singing and some of my recent reading. In the last six months I have had the fortune of being exposed to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I read a portion of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, a chapter called 'The Chiasm / The Intertwining', and large portions of Gadamer's Truth and Method. I continue to have misgivings about both the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, but now isn't the time for me to explore my inadequately grasped apprehensions. There is, however, something profound in both of those books. I want to write on them briefly, in the context of Musgraves' singing. I include the entirety of the lyrics to her song 'Love is a Wild Thing':

'You can't find it sitting on a shelf in a store
If you try to hide it, it's gonna shine even more

Even if you lose it, it will find you
There's no way to stop it, but they'll try to

Running like a river trying to find the ocean
Flowers in the concrete
Climbing over fences, blooming in the shadows
Places that you can't see
Coming through the melody when the night bird sings
Love is a wild thing, yeah

Oh, I can feel it, magic in your fingertips
And I can hear it in the words coming off your lips

Even if you lose me, I will find you
There's no way to stop it, so don't try to

Running like a river trying to find the ocean
Flowers in the concrete
Climbing over fences, blooming in the shadows
Places that you can't see
Coming through…'

How ordinary these words sound. So much of her music reeks of these potential platitudes. But somehow she manages to infuse them with life, with a genuine seeing of the normally-too-familiar-to-be-seen.

The crucial word for my reflections here is 'wild'. When she says 'love is wild thing' it would be possible to interpret 'wild' in the sense of 'crazy', 'unpredictable', or 'uncontrolled'. I think her real meaning, however, is closer to the sense of 'wild' as 'of the natural world', 'growing in a natural or uncultivated way'. Her lyrics make this clear enough. 'Running like a river trying to find the ocean...', 'Flowers in the concrete'... I am left with the sense of love as something that inexplicably pervades the natural world in the same way that life constantly appears in the most unexpected places. Life and love find their ways. 

It is clear that while her imagery begins with the natural world (flowers, rivers, birds, so on) these insights similarly apply to the experience of human love. 'I can feel it, magic in your fingertips/And I can hear it in the words coming off your lips.' The experience of human love is an experience of discovery, the experience of a force outside of us that demands it be reckoned with. Love is wild in that it grows around us. We are reapers, not sowers. 

Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer provide insights into this sort of experience that I think worth exploring. I will not cite them, I do not have that kind of time these days.

The major thrust of MP's essay 'The Chiasm/The Intertwining' is to work out something like a phenomenology of nature. This phenomenology of nature, in turn, is based on the experience of vision. The visual field, according to MP, implies the existence of the tactile field. Vision palpates, he says. To be able to see is to imply the capacity to touch. Our bodies appear in the visual field along with the rest of reality. From the experience of seeing our own body in the visual field we can infer that we belong to the fundamental natural order. It is impossible to look at our bodies without knowing that our bodies are seamlessly intertwined with our minds, or with thinking that is, in principle, hidden from the view of others. The visibility of our bodies implies the invisibility of our thoughts. The human experience is unintelligible unless we accept that the visible necessarily implies the invisible, or that bodily comportion necessarily implies thoughts that 'give rise' to those actions. This intertwining is too intimate in our lives to be cleanly separated. But our thinking demands that we make this statement about the necessary dependence of the visible and the invisible in human experience.

This idea that the visible field necessarily implies the existence of the invisible, in the sense of 'thought' or 'meaning' that governs visible movement, applies to the entirety of nature. It is obvious that animals, like humans, are unintelligible except from their assumed inner lives. The visible action of a squirrel implies their invisibile inner life. This is true also of a rock falling down a hill, or a tree rustling in the wind. All that is visible necessarily implies the existence of something invisible. The experience of intelligibility implies this relationship between the visible and the invisible. 

Intelligibility itself, I am tempted to say, is this relationship between the visible and the invisible.

The translator, Alphonso Lingis, claims that MP was working towards a conception of what he called 'wild logos', or meaning that pervades the natural world. I lied when I said I wouldn't cite. This long quotation captures what I have been attempting to say here: 

"Already our existence as seers... and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says.... The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of 'psychic reality' spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes, and to speak of its 'style' is in our view to form a metaphor. In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valery said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth" (155, my emphasis). 

If we are serious about taking human experience as a guide to the nature of reality, then something like this account seems necessary to me. Just as bodily comportion is unintelligible without reference to the 'invisible' domain of thought, so the world's activity, its movement, is not intelligible without reference to its invisibility. We live in the midst of wild logos, or natural meaning.

If we live in the midst of wild logos, nay, are wild logos, then it follows that all activity is a form of speech or writing. If we are political creatures, which we are, it follows that all action is not only speech or writing, but dialog. If all speech or activity is dialog, then it is not up to us what we are or what we say. This is one of the lessons that I initially learned from my friend Collingwood, but that I have recently reapproached through Gadamer. I won't say much about Gadamer except that he is a strong voice for the language as an ontological condition. Where he falls short, I fear, is that his is an exclusively human account. With MP, I see the possibility of expanding Gadamer's account to include the whole of the natural world, a conception of all being as dialogical.

What does this have to do with Kacey Musgraves? 

Love is indeed a wild thing. It is part of the wild logos. It is, at that, a particularly dialogal form of the wild logos in that it is the ultimate relational experience. Or, at the very least, the most unequivocally good form of the wild logos. When asked: What is good in itself? I am tempted to answer: Love.

I am in a position that I have been in before: there is so much stuff between me and another person. It isn't my choice that it is there. The space between us is full of it whether I like it or not. But somehow it is still a choice how we relate to what is there. I am unable, at this time, to act on what is there, because the other person is not able or willing to do so. They have other dialogues that they find more pressing or worthy than fully dialogging with me. I find this at odds with my current life task.

My current life task, I will dramatically and flippantly declare for the purpose of this writing, is to explore the notion of listening as a way of being. If the world speaks, then it is up to me to listen. If even my own existence is a kind of speech, it is up to me to listen to myself. If my relationships with other people speak in their own way, it is up to me to listen to what those relationships say. To do otherwise feels like an experience of dishonesty. This is what pains me. I cannot dialog partially with them. They cannot dialog fully with me. They have other wild logos to listen to.

Perhaps this notion of listening as a way of being is best described in the language of situation. I will be reading some more Gendlin this summer and so will have some opportunity to reflect on his notion of situatedness and focusing and all that good stuff. 

It occurs to me that I'm really just trying, again, still, to grapple with something that Collingwood described as deference to the situation at hand. I conclude with a long quote from him:

"The rational activity which historians have to study is never free from compulsion: the compulsion to face the facts of its own situation. The more rational it is, the more completely it undergoes this compulsion. To be rational is to think; and for a man who proposes to act, the thing that it is important to think about is the situation in which he stands. With regard to this situation, he is not free at all. It is what it is, and neither he nor anyone else can ever change that. For though the situation consists altogether of thoughts, his own and other people's, it cannot be changed by a change of mind on the part of himself or anyone else. If minds change, as they do, this merely means that with the lapse of time a new situation has arisen. For a man about to act, the situation is his master, his oracle, his god. Whether his action is to prove successful or not depends on whether he grasps the situation rightly or not. If he is a wise man, it is not until he has consulted his oracle, done everything in his power to find out what the situation is, that he will make even the most trivial plan. And if he neglects the situation, the situation will not neglect him. It is not one of those gods that leave an insult unpunished."

I don't know what to do about my situation. Waiting is always an option.