Where I've Been

I have not written here in two months.

Why?

I have had several false starts, several essays/posts begun and not quite finished. The writing was fruitful, and perhaps I will post it as a 'fragment'. Perhaps those fragments will be useful for me to display and study.

More likely I have been distracted by the pandemic that has seized the world. I live in Seattle. I have been working from home for 6 weeks. I do therapy over the phone for the time being.

I also recently learned that there is a conference in October on the work of Eugene Gendlin. It is hosted by SU and the Focusing Institute/Gendlin Center. I am preparing an abstract so to present at the conference. I hope to give a paper on the implications of Gendlin's work in forensic environments. I will be connecting Gendlin to the esoteric writing tradition in some capacity.

I seem to quickly grow weary of writing in this format.

Thinking in an organized way...

I have a complete draft of an abstract for a paper on Gendlin. It'll be done by the time it needs to be done.

I have been reading quite a lot.

I've read many of Gendlin's essays in Saying What we Mean. I numbered the paragraphs and made an outline of the first chapter of Thinking Beyond Patterns. I did the same thing for the entirety of Descartes' Discourse on the Method. That was very satisfying and confirmed my general reading of Descartes as political conspirator. The Discourse is somewhat like the Communist Manifesto, in that it is kind of pamphlet inviting others to join in a mass joint enterprise. Quite a document. I have looked at portions of Merleau-Ponty's Prose of he World and Phenomenology of Perception. I am almost done with the final lecture in Whitehead's Modes of Thought. I am 75 pages into Peter Levine's Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma. I read a very interesting essay on clinical epistemology in Naomi Scheman's book Shifting Ground. Very interesting and relevant to my pscychotherapeutic clinical practice.

I keep meaning to look at Plato's Thaeatetus. I took Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy off the shelf today. Descartes' reading of Machiavelli seems to be of significance. I have a big biography of Descartres by a guy named Gaukroger that I just pulled off the shelf. A few significant references to Bacon, a good Machiavellian, but only a few thin references to Machiavelli. I need to look directly at Descartes' correspondence with Princess Elisabeth (I just found them online).

My project on Gendlin in some ways hinges on a reframing of Descartes as an inheritor of a tradition of philosophic propaganda that moves from Machiavelli and Bacon to Descartes.

Gendlin's project of rediscovering the 'implicit' or natural order relies on a narrative of the forgetting of the natural order. It doesn't happen until sometime around Kant. Coincidentally, this lines up with the forgetting of esotericism. Descartes, however, he claims, laid the groundwork for this by championing Gallileo's method of imposing geometric form onto problems for practical utility. Descartes made spherical cows politically useful and pursuable through a joint political project. Gendlin understands the first half of this formulation. I'm not sure he understands the depth of Descartes' political thought.

Gendlin's philosophical narrative needs to be broadened. Strauss and Melzer have a richer, more compelling account. And it has implications for work in forensic mental health.

Making Things, Showing Them: Thoughts on Art and Putting it Somewhere

I recently hung some of my paintings and poems in a coffee shop that I used to work at. That I used to work at the shop is an important part of the story. I probably would not have sought out the opportunity on my own, and am grateful that my former manager, a friend, was kind enough to invite me to show my work.

It feels strange to have hung my art there and I have been reflecting on why I began painting and writing poetry more seriously. I want to take some time to reflect on the process and what it has to do with my larger learning in philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. I have no doubt they are all connected, but it is unclear how.

I am uncomfortable with the word ‘art’ or the idea of identifying as an ‘artist’. Those words have peculiar connotations in modern philosophy. In the seventeenth century when Francis Bacon spoke of ‘the arts’ he meant something like the technical arts or what we call technology. Bacon dreamt of god-like mastery of the world through science and ‘the arts’. Indeed, a large part of what I resist in the notion of ‘art’ is an implication of control, mastery, or god-like power. Twentieth century philosophers make this legacy apparent: Camus speaks of the artist ‘giving the void its colors,’ while Sartre praises the god-like creativity of authentic human beings. Even Bob Ross says peculiar things like ‘On this canvas you have complete control, absolute freedom, you can move mountains.’ One of my best friends, a professional illustrator and designer once joked that artists are often ‘control freaks.’ She and I both prefer to talk about ‘making things’ or being ‘makers, rather than ‘art’ or ‘artists’.

I think that the peculiar masterful or theological character of the notion of ‘art’ has something to do with the modern orientation towards control, and something to do with the biblical notion of ‘creation’. Nowadays we praise ‘creativity’; I see children wearing shirts with the word ‘Creative’ displayed in colorful and exciting letters. I find it strange because creation is a fundamentally biblical notion: God creates, and God creates from nothing.

I feel much more clumsy, uncertain, and relatively out of control. I do not feel masterful in the things I make. I make because I am trying to learn, not because I am trying to master. Of course, I have gotten better at controlling certain types of paints, certain brushes, certain techniques. But technique is not of the essence of making things. Perhaps that is the simplest distinction I can make right now: Art is an ambiguous word that is not sufficiently distinguished from technique. I suppose ‘making’ is comparably ambiguous, but it is also broad in a way I like.

The big questions I want to try and unpack in this writing is, What, if any, is the difference between making and creating? Why am I so resistant to the notion of art and creativity, and associate them so readily with problems of control, mastery, and aspirations to god-hood? And how can I develop an account of making that is simultaneously sincere, ironic, clumsy, and human?

This thinking will follow several sets of distinctions:

1. Body, Language, Image
2. Creating and Making, Mastery and Irony
3. Opacity, Traces, Encountering

There is a story in all these words for me.

1. Body, Language, Image
I started painting and writing poetry more seriously while I was in graduate school to become a psychotherapist. I took a class called 'listening skills.' Once a week me, four students, and an instructor sat in a small room, probably 10x12. We were told that we would be splitting into pairs; one person would be the speaker, the other would be the listener. Our task was to speak and listen as carefully as possible. Listening carefully is surprisingly difficult, as is speaking carefully.

The question that arises is: how do you know when you have understood a person correctly, and how do you know when you have spoken carefully? We are using words in order to express or communicate experience. What is the relationship between words and experience? My mind melts under the weight of such a question.

The wager of the course, and one I am largely persuaded by, is that words and experience meet most intimately in the experience of the body. We know we have spoken carefully, in other words, when we feel it in a visceral way. Similarly, we know we have listened carefully when we can feel what a person is saying, and when we can reflect back to that person what we are hearing-feeling in a way that they recognize. If we reflect what someone has said in an inaccurate way the person will generally tell us, either explicitly or with their bodily presence.

The listening skills class was thus spent developing this embodied awareness while speaking and listening.

The class was built around Eugene Gendlin's notion of 'focusing'. Gendlin is a gifted philosopher who happened to get hooked up with Carl Rogers after writing a dissertation on language and embodiment. 'Focusing' is a process whereby one tries to track the way that different words relate to a bodily 'felt-sense' of a problem, situation, or experience. When I think of the fact that I am happy or unhappy at my job, a whole slew of bodily feelings come along. I feel my shoulder joints tighten, my hands feels restless, and my mind is flush with images. All of these various phenomena are the 'felt-sense' of a situation. In therapy, and in focusing, there is an effort to give voice to this 'felt-sense' of things.

There is a characteristic pattern of speech, reflection, and correction, that therapist and client go through. "It feels like I'm underwater." "Oh, underwater?" "Yeah, underwater, but its more like I'm trapped beneath some ice, and I'm trying to get out from under the ice." "You feel trapped under this water, like you are drowning below this ice." "Yeah, but that's not quite right, it's more like..." When we go through this pattern of correction and deepening of description, what are we checking the words against? How do we know that one image fits more than another image? Gendlin's wager is that we are checking the words against our 'felt-sense' of the whole situation. This all rhymes very well with Bessel van der Kolk's claim that visceral awareness is the beginning and core of emotional awareness. The body, as our intelligent organism, as the home of our lives, is more intelligent than we know, and if we can learn to listen to it, we will see how often it speaks.

Gendlin's work raises questions about the place of images in life and thinking. Why would it be that images intersect with the emotional-embodied life in this way? Why do so many of my clients effortlessly use metaphors to describe their situations? Why do we dream in images, scenes, that we know are connected to our daily lives? I recently read portions of Freud's dream book, and I am aware of the work of Lakoff and Johnson on the place of metaphors.

I am interested in the idea that the image is a kind of intermediary between the world of the body and the world of articulate speech. I believe this is how Dr. Krycka at SU spoke of it: focusing relies on the murky space between the pre-symbolic body and the more purely symbolic world of language. The image is the original form of language. But the image is an extrapolation from the experience of the visual field.

The conclusion I want to draw from all this is that the world is already a type of language or logos or meaning... The world is a wild logos and our bodies are our most intimate place of interfacing between us and that wild logos. Dr. Risser at SU said he talked to Gendlin about how 'if the bodily felt-sense is capable of being rendered in language then it must already be languaged in some sense.' For if the body were somehow radically other than language, if language were mere symbol, imposed upon the world, then language would have no way to make contact with the body.

The experience of focusing, the experience of the image as interfacing intimately with the body, seems to be evidence of the fundamental or primordial status of language. The world is language. Our bodies are the language of the world speaking itself.

But why would we have to interface with images in a self-conscious way? Why do certain images reveal portions of reality better than others?

One thing I want to insist on is that the point of engagement with images as they meet embodied felt-sense is not to interpret the images. The images are to be communed with. The power of the dream is to be felt. It isn't important to unpack, analyze, interpret the dream or the image. It is important to dwell with, commune with, indulge the image or the dream. Feel what the image says.

All this is relevant to me because I have been busy making images... like this one:

This image somehow gives voice to my philosophical concerns. I wonder about celestial bodies. I wonder about monuments. I wonder about towers and trees and living things. But am I interpreting the thing I made? How do I look at the image and not interpret it? How do I not wonder what it means? Are there images that are more self-sufficient? When is an image sufficiently pregnant? When does it need to give birth to richer content other than itself?

As I read Plato, for example, all his images seem to beg to be interpreted, wondered about. But the analysis of the image will always fail, and at some point there is only the pregnant suggestions of the images. The image needs to have the status of self-sufficient-pregnant-being, and implication, or suggestion of analysis.

Enough of this. I make images because images are somehow in-between the-body-as-language and speech-as-language. This could be made to sound boring by saying that all thought is metaphorical or some other platitude. But something very mysterious and peculiar is going on with the status of images. The image gives us access to ourselves as the speech of the world that is capable of knowing itself as the speech of the world.

This, somehow, leads me to the problem of art, mastery, and irony.

2. Creating and Making, Mastery and Irony
When I make images that give rise to my philosophical questions I am limited by in my technical ability and in my ability to know what it is I'm saying. I am limited by technique and implication. What I've said above implies that the images I make will always say more than I realize I'm saying. In that way I do not feel in control of the images, and I do need to analyze the images.

Yet why is it that the notion of art has so much of a connection to divinity? What is up with the idea of the muses? The idea of creation and creativity? What is up with the existentialists replacing the philosopher with the artist and praising the god-like power of art? Why, in short, is art spoken of as a form of mastery? and what else could we be?

I have explicated in another post my questions about the relationship between art and mastery. I don't care to do that now. But what I would like to juxtapose is an ironic account of making, in a very specific sense of the word irony.

Irony is about sincerity.

Jonathan Lear has a wonderful book I have not yet finished called A Case for Irony. In a series of lectures he lays out a vision of irony in which it is no longer synonymous with insincerity, obfuscation, and distance, but rather with sincerity, seriousness, and the pursuit of truth. His major models for this kind of irony are Kierkegaard and Socrates. And Kierkegaard, of course, read the shit out of Plato and had much admiration for Socrates.

The core of irony, Lear claims, is a kind of erotic uncanniness. It is an experience, or an attitude, in which we long for something after we realize that we do not know something we thought we knew. Let's look at these two words, beginning with uncanny.

The uncanny (Unheimlich) is an unsettling experience in which the normally familiar becomes extremely unfamiliar in an unsettling way. We are sitting on the bus, on our way to work, and suddenly it becomes radically strange that we are all here, in this place, going to our fucking jobs, to make this money, that we need in order to pay rent and buy food to nourish our poor bodies. All of these things (places, jobs, money, rent, food, bodies) are so ordinary. But when we stop and look at them we don't really know how any of it works... the uncanny rises up to greet us when the world presents itself in its constant unfamiliarity.

If we were simply to be struck with the strangeness of things, the perhaps ungroundedness of things, we would arrive at a spurious or derivative form of irony, one in which we are tempted to say 'well I guess there is no such thing as truth, no reason any of this is like this.' If that were the case, we would be free to present and act however we want. We wouldn't know how to take ourselves seriously, and we wouldn't ask anyone to take us seriously. We would be ironic like the worst kind of hipster: is the torn band t-shirt and the mustache and the mullet cool because it's so uncool? Or has it somehow broken through to being so uncool that it is actually cool?

Whence sincerity in this form of the uncanny? Whence the ground for wanting and believing in the truth?

Eroticism, or eros, is necessary to transform the experience of uncanniness into the experience of irony (as sincerity). Socrates is the most erotic of philosophers. He wants nothing more than to know the truth of the unchanging things. He spends his days in constant serious, albeit playful, pursuit of the truth of things. He longs to know. Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, is driven chiefly by desire, desire culled originally from the experience of desire for the body and soul of the beloved. When the familiar becomes unfamiliar, as it often does in Socrates' dazzling dialectics, we do not throw up our hands; we look further afield, we continue to long and to wonder what these things really are. With the addition of erotic longing for truth the experience of the uncanny becomes a fertile breeding ground for the emergence of the ironic longing that is constitutive of Socrates' being.

With all of this said, it should be clear why Lear says that irony expresses itself most characteristically in tautology. Kierkegaard asks, 'In Christendom are there any Christians?'. Socrates asks, 'Among the philosophers are there any philosophers?'. I ask, 'Among all the therapists are there any therapists?' In each case these words (Christians, philosophers, therapists) appear in two distinct senses. The first use of the word points toward the social role and all of its incumbent attitudes and practices. The second use points towards the ideal or real form of the word. In tautological questions such as these we open up a gap between the supposed or socially sanctioned existence of a phenomena, and we begin to wonder about what really makes the thing we are after.

I work as a therapist. A therapist ought to be a healing person. This is what it means to be a therapist: to be a force for healing in the lives of others. There are many people, however, who have occupied the social role of therapist and may not have taken themselves as healing persons very seriously (although I'm sure most do). Getting a degree and a license, we all know, is not sufficient to making one a therapist, just as going to church every Sunday does not make one a Christian, nor does getting a philosophy degree make one a philosopher.

What do we really mean by these god damn words that we use all the damn time? Do we have any idea what we mean when we say that we want to be a good person, a philosopher, a therapist, a friend, a lover, a human being? What do these words mean?

The experience of irony is the experience of knowing that we do not know what these words really mean. Irony means continually encountering the familiar as unfamiliar, and continuing to move towards it in a desire to understand what it really means.

I love Lear's account of irony. Irony is erotic uncanniness: it is longing for the truth of a thing after running over and over into the unfamiliarity of the socially sanctioned, defined, 'known' things.

I regard my experience of making art as one of ironic making of images in an attempt to feed my larger ironic process of attempting to understand. Among the artists, are there any artists? Of course there are, and it isn't my job to tell someone they aren't an artist. But what does it mean to be an artist? Does it mean to make things, artifacts? Does it mean to be technically skilled? What does it mean? It has something to do with artifacts, with technique, no doubt. But doesn't it mean more?

When I make images, paintings, poems, I do not know what I am making. I am surprised by what I make. Like Flannery O'Connor and E.M. Forster said, 'I don't know what I think until I see what I write.' I don't know what I think, what I'm after, until I see what I make. In this way my process of making objects is ironic in the sense described above: it is about continually trying to encounter the unfamiliar in an attempt to continually long for the truth of things.

What am I trying to understand when I make images like this and I write poems on top of them?

I am not trying to be in control. I am not trying to master anything (unless the term mastery is used very carefully). I'm not trying to be creative. I'm trying to understand, and to support myself in my longing to understand.

Thus the image of ironic making that I am offering is in contradistinction to an image of making or creation that is masterful or god-like. I thought about a lot of this while reading Genesis recently. The God of Genesis is so Ungodlike: he's absolutely clueless about what he is doing. 'Oh, I really fucked up making these people, I'm going to drown them all'. He is described as being sorrowful and regretful about what he has done. God in the bible has no idea what he is doing when he makes us. His makings immediately get out of hand for him.

How could it be otherwise? How could what we make ever be anything that we know entirely? Don't our makings always get away from us, reveal more to us than we knew? Then how could an account of making possibly be about control or mastery? Or am I just so poisoned by my encounters with existentialism? I suspect this is the case. Other people must have more moderate accounts of making that aren't about power, mastery, or control.

But then there is the supposed modern maxim: we only know what we can make. Thus mathematics as a privileged form of knowledge, as some believe it to be a human construction. Thus the power of social constructionist views (to which I am largely sympathetic).

What is the relationship between knowing and making anyways?

I transition to a hasty conclusion, for I grow weary of this writing.


3. Opacity, Traces, Encounter
I am deeply opaque to myself. I become most tranparent to myself in retrospect. It is not until I have seen what I have done that I say, 'oh, now I see what I was up to.'

Why did I get reiki trained as a teenager? Why did I study military history as an undergraduate? Why did I dive headlong into self-imposed scholarship? Why did I spend so many years making coffee? Why was I so afraid of graduate school? Why am I working in the job I work in now?

All of these things have been attempts to heal, to grow, to learn the things I needed to learn.

Kierkegaard was onto something when he said, to paraphrase, 'life has to be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards'. Irony has something to do with this, but as of now I am not sure what.

Making objects gives me the opportunity to encounter traces of myself in the world. Collingwood: 'If I want to see what kind of person I am, I need to go out into the world and do things. Only once I have done those things will I be able to examine the traces of my activity and say "aha, this is the kind of person I am".'

This, I hope and think, is what I am up to with my making of objects, whether it be paintings, poems, or the thousands of pages of writing I have and will produce. I am looking to know what I am, what kind of person I am. I am studying those traces. I am leaving those traces. I am studying those traces.

I encounter myself, I see what I am, and I long to know more.

 I've said enough. I've done enough. I will study this writing in the coming days, and encounter these traces too.

Leaving Our Nature for Nature: Compressed Thoughts on Political Philosophy as First Philosophy

We are the kind of being that by nature makes things. Nowadays we speak readily of ourselves as constructing or co-constructing reality. There seems to be something about being human that makes it necessary for us to make things.

The most characteristic thing that human beings make are laws, rules, nomoi, or, in a word, culture. Invariably human communities are bound by shared practices and customs that regulate the range of acceptable action and thought.

The laws or cultures of human communities generally originate in some relation to the sacred or the divine. Mythical founders were the children of gods, knew the gods, learned from the gods, or were the gods. In the last few hundred years we have seen for the first time governments or states that claim to be fully human, finally non-theological. These governments, states, and peoples, however, retain an awareness and a relationship with the notion of the divine. It merely takes different shapes, like scientific mastery, or history (as in 'history is watching you').

The most characteristic creation of the animal that by nature makes, law, is intrinsically linked to an awareness of goodness. The laws given to the founders were meant to be the laws of the good or best society. The law says what is good. Awareness of goodness implies awareness of badness, both of which imply awareness of better and worst.

The human being enters the world as a being most familiar with the sacred laws and customs made by the community. Nothing other than an ability to obey and fit into these laws and customs is required for a human life. The human being can live entirely within what they have made.

The being that makes by nature has the peculiar ability to hide nature from itself by its makings. Laws and customs about sex and gender, for example, can profoundly obscure the fluidity with which sex and gender and actually exist in the world. That men should have short hair is a social construction. That certain beings are capable of reproducing with others is not.

Nature should be understood principally as contradistinct from law, custom, and convention. Nature is precisely that which is not constructed. The natural is unchanging, and true simply.

Nature is obscured to the being that by nature makes.

In order for the being that by nature makes to attain knowledge of nature that being must learn to make things in a way that points beyond or transcends the thing made.

The creation of laws as the most characteristic form of human creation is logically preceded by a more fundamental feature of our nature: our ability to speak. Our ability to speak is what makes possible our nature as beings that make.

One of our principal ways of speaking is metaphor, or the making of analogically significant images.

The being that by nature makes seeks knowledge of nature by making in such a way so as to not mistake the thing made for nature.

The being that by nature makes seeks to make images that offer a potency or pregnancy that can make nature present to us.

Because the being that makes by nature always begins from the makings of the community, the pursuit of nature must begin from the predominant opinions of the community.

The laws and customs of the community structure the opinions of the community. The laws and customs are of divine character and speak to the good. The opinions of the community are thus opinions about the good way of living received from the gods.

The pursuit of nature is the pursuit of what is really good by nature, and not simply by convention or custom. The pursuit of nature must therefore ascend from the opinions of the community, the opinions of the political body.

Political philosophy is thereby a privileged starting point in the pursuit of nature.

To be a human animal that seeks knowledge of nature is to confront the prevailing views of the political community that serve as the original structure of our souls. To seek is to make images that can provide the questions obscured by the laws and provide answers that allow the next question to emerge.

Political philosophy is the necessary beginning point of philosophy.

Political philosophy in a most peculiar sense.

The Desire for a Project as the Desire for Wholeness

I spoke with my dad on Sunday. We talked about many things, but the notion of 'projects' came up repeatedly. I was expressing to him that I don't know what my current project is. I am hanging paintings at a coffee shop in about a month, and I feel myself wanting to pivot artistically. I don't feel inclined to condense my graduate school integration paper into a piece of publishable writing, as my professor suggested. I do want to write and attempt to publish at some point. But truthfully I am still sitting with all the ambivalence that I feel about engaging with the academic world. It isn't clear to me that publishing in some psychology, psychotherapy, or philosophy journal is a very meaningful enterprise.

My dad pointed out that it was peculiar, or interesting, or curious, that I found myself so badly in want of a project. I pointed out that he, too, has projects. But he said that his projects are more modest: 'I want to work on my car,' 'I want to paint some trees,' 'I want to build a table.' My projects are of a more scholarly and philosophical bent. I have produced many large writing projects over the last ten years that span somewhere between 1,000 - 1,500 pages of writing. I just looked at my old blog, www.civilizedriley.blogspot.com and clicked on the tag 'Substantial Essay'. I immediately encountered several  long pieces of writing that I had entirely forgotten about.

Why in the world am I always producing all these writings? What is going on? Why as I've grown older do I hesitate more to produce them?

I had the idea that part of what I want from a project is an experience of wholeness. Projects are, in some ways, extensive reports on a body of experiences that I have had. I move outside of myself and take stock. Collingwood talks this way about philosophical systems in his Essay on Philosophical Method: A philosophical system is nothing but an intermediary report on the progress that mind has made up until that point. All of this sounds very Hegelian.

A project allows me to stop and look upon my work as though it were done in the process of it still happening. A project is like hades: My life is over and I'm alive to enjoy it. A project allows me to die and be dead.

My final graduate school paper was such a project. That part of my life was over with that project. I was standing at the end of that experience, and I was looking back, with everything I had carried until that point. That is probably part of why I cried so much writing it, writing about my clients from my internship.

I can only conclude that I have not lived enough yet to have another project. I need to keep having experiences, reading books, meeting people, making art, working my job in forensic mental health. These things will crystallize when it is time.

It is not yet time.

There are other ways to feel whole, but there is nothing quite like the next Great Report.

A Report on My Reading: Heidegger, Trauma, Other Stuff

I was just on the East coast for 10 days visiting family for the holidays. I had a very good time.

I like using this blog as a place for my future self to return to and keep track of my learning and reading. I saw an old friend and he told me he still speaks of 'future Efron' the way that I used to speak of 'future Riley.' I used to say things like 'future Riley will have this figured out...' or 'Gotta do this now, future Riley will be glad I did.' I told my friend that I was thinking about how future Riley never really exists. It's always present Riley. There is, however, a past Riley. I see his traces in the world and I learn about him and me by studying those traces.

I thus leave a trace of what I've been up to.

On the plane ride out I read Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'. On the plane ride back I read his 'Question Concerning Technology'. Both are tremendously stimulating pieces of writing. I am happy that I am deepening my understanding of his idea of 'destiny' and the seeming project of 'waiting for the gods'. These are thoughts I became familiar with while reading 'What Are Poets For?' and 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking.' The 'Question' also makes a claim, briefly, provocatively, that physis and poiesis are in some sense equivalent, or that physis is a kind of poiesis. This seems peculiar and problematic to me. The ancient understanding of physis, or nature, as I understand it, was always spoken of in contradistinction to law, custom, or nomos. Nomos, I am sure, is a type of poiesis, or making--it is one of the quintessential forms of making.

There is a relation between nature and making, no doubt. And Heidegger is right that the chief task of making is to show things as they are. Making reveals nature. This is of the essence of Heidegger's definition of phenomenology as a type of speaking that reveals things as they are. But to claim that nature is itself a form of making... this seems peculiar to me. We are the being that by nature makes. But I am not comfortable or convinced by the idea that nature itself is a kind of making.

Keir will be exploring this in his dissertation on the notion of production and I look forward to the fruits of his inquiry and our dialogue surrounding it.

It is clear to me now that I need to understand Heidegger's relationship to Holderlin, and how in the world Heidegger arrives at this idea of the 'destiny of being' that reveals itself as the task of thinking. He is so powerful. But as Keir said to me in a text message this morning, 'Read poetry and await destiny. Thanks H that really helps us avoid the technological apocalypse.' There is something so strange in Heidegger's neglect of politics.

I am becoming more comfortable with the idea that history is really a substitute for the ancient understanding of politics, and that relational ontology is a degraded attempt to recover something like a genuine understanding of ourselves as a political animal. Perhaps that is the post I will write next. It feels rich.

I also read an excellent essay called 'Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms of Diagnosis, Disability, and Stigma Under Welfare Reform.' The essay illuminates the way that the 96' Clinton reforms of welfare essentially destroyed genuine social services in America and replaced them with a medicalized form of care that coerces individuals into accepting diagnoses, medication regimes, and inculcates new roles and identities that complicate questions of poverty and mental illness. Someone recently told me that they thought of community mental health as 'government mind control of the poor.' I am inclined to agree with this view, even if there is a part of me that wants to moderate the conspiratorial tones of it. I have, however, been becoming a more conspiratorial thinker.

I also read most of Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps The Score. A tremendous book that I am delighted to have read. My god. The research, the ideas, the practices. So powerful. I only have to read the epilogue in which van der Kolk seems to make a call for a new politicized understanding of trauma and mental illness. Indeed, I saw he wrote a 2019 article on the politics of mental health. I hope to build on that work. There are many places in the book where the significance of socialism is implied. I am more and more convinced that mental health counselors need to be advocates for socialism, and fierce opponents of capitalism, if we are to be anything other than tools of the system.

I also had a chance to see my aunt and uncle who are both therapists in the Virginia area. They told me that a while ago they were at a conference on the DSM-3. My uncle said he asked the chair of the committee, 'What about complex PTSD as a diagnosis?' to which he said 'If we let that trauma stuff in it will take over everything.' There is profound resistance in the psychological and psychiatric community to the idea that mental illness is about social and political violence and cannot be understood adequately through biological etiology. I am delighted that my uncle told me this. Delighted and horrified. It confirms so much of what I am thinking and what van der Kolk is writing about. My aunt bluntly confirmed many of my hunches as well, telling me that she really believed trauma to be at the heart of all this, and that the establishment likes to divide the world into 'those weird ones over there with mental illness and us normal people over here.'

It feels more and more urgent to understand trauma as an extreme manifestation of the violence and coercion that all of us experience at the hands of society. A conflictualist analysis of politics is invaluable in this respect.

I also read a paper on polyvagal theory that clarified my understanding of the significance of Porges' emphasis on evolution.

I also read a paper on Clausewitz and his relationship to Schleiermacher and, potentially, Plato. As Keir said 'everything is coming full circle.' I will speak to my undergraduate mentor, Jon Sumida, at some point, as his work is one of the main influence on that essay. I have been working, slowly and quietly in ways I don't understand yet, to integrate my undergraduate study of military history into my new orientation of politicized and philosophical psychotherapy/psychology. This includes a return to Clausewitz and Collingwood. I will undoubtedly do more work on Collingwood, and perhaps on Clausewitz.

I also read a fascinating essay by Jon Mills called 'Deconstructing Hermes', and when I arrived home last night my copy of his book Conundrums was at my apartment. I am excited to engage his work. He seems spot on with this critiques. I am not sure I am persuaded by his positive alternatives. I watched a lecture of his recently and he seemed to advocate for a return to modern sensibilities as opposed to post-modern decadence. I still favor something more aggressively 'natural' or ancient.

I will continue to reflect on the significance of esoteric hermeneutics. An adequate understanding of esotericism provides not only a viable hermeneutics, but also a politics, a psychology, and an ontology. It frees us from the modern emphasis on 'method', which so flippantly disregards the necessary links between epistemology and ontology.

I will leave it at this. I am excited to be back and to continue my learning. I also just received a copy of Hegel's Encyclopedia, and have 1/3 of Aristotle's De Anima to finish. From there I will be reading, soonish, Aristotle's Politics, some Rousseau, probably some Mills and some other stuff. I'm excited to be able to keep working on this all. It is good to be back. It was good to see my family. I love them very much, and feel sad that this report makes it seem as if though my time visiting the East coast was about my reading. I loved reading while I was there. But I also loved being around them, seeing my old friends, remembering and seeing more deeply where I come from, and why I am this way.

I sent back my great-grandfather's letters from while he was in Germany in the wake of WWII. He had a nervous breakdown there... I want to understand what happened to him so I can have a deeper grasp on who I am, who my family is. I will keep learning.

Scratching an Itch: Thoughts on Distinctions, Reality's Layers, and Esotericism

My plans for this evening were unexpectedly cancelled. I was supposed to have dinner with my aunt and a couple that she is friends with. Both of these people are mental health counselors, and one of them was a member of DSA and actively works and reflects on socialist causes. I, too, am a mental health counselor, and have strong socialist leanings. It would have been a nice night.

Alas, my aunt has the flu.

Instead, I cooked dinner, watched some of the beginnings of the opening statements of the Zizek-Peterson debate, worked on a painting, and, now, am writing a bit.

I mostly just wanted to write.

I have about six posts I have titles for on various topics, but I don't know that I will write them all, and they all feel to difficult right now. I am pleased with the overall direction of my thinking and reading right now. I feel that things are accumulating in a promising way. But I am reticent about preparing any type of documents suitable for publication.

I have been doing much reflecting and some writing about the problem of rhetoric in part because I am frustrated and irritated with the idea of having to write in a way that would be suitable for an academic audience. It isn't yet clear to me the value of trying to speak to such an audience.

I have come to make a pretty firm distinction between academia, scholarship, and philosophy. I am primarily concerned with philosophy and scholarship, and scholarship generally insofar as it contributes to philosophy. By scholarship I mean the careful study of texts and the production of writings about those texts. By philosophy I mean an ongoing effort to live in light of our ignorance about the most important questions, and a corresponding desire to pursue answers to those questions. I am a scholar. I read carefully and I try to write seriously. I would like to think of myself as a philosopher, but I relate ambivalently to that word, and to most labels in general. I, for example, write and paint quite a lot but do not call myself a writer or a painter or an artist. But more than anything else I supposed I'd like to call myself a philosopher. It just feels a little silly. For there are so many philosophers out there, and it still isn't clear to me if there are any philosophers among them.

I think I like to use words carefully, and all of those labels don't ever quite feel right because I never quite know what they mean.

Working as a therapist I am reflecting more on the notion of fine-grained distinctions and fine-grained feelings. Recently someone told me they were 'comfortable' where they were at, and didn't feel the need to, say, get a job or go to school. This person, like many of us, experiences pressure from family and friends to either get a job or go to school. I ended up making a distinction, saying by comfortable we might mean 'feeling good about where we are and not needing to answer to these external calls to action', or by comfortable we might also mean 'complacent, resigned, and settling for a situation that could potentially be better.' It isn't clear to me where this person lands.

I am still trying to understand the value of such distinctions. Once a therapist asked me to describe anxiety, and after I tried he said 'it sounds to me like you are describing fear.' Is there really a real difference between anxiety and fear? On what basis do we make these distinctions?

I am confident that the distinctions are more than just verbal: our body responds to these distinctions and knows when a word, phrase, or image is well suited to an experience. Again, Eugene Gendlin's work on 'focusing' and implicit intricacy has been hugely influential on me: When we pay attention to our body and the 'felt-sense' of a problem or situation we can literally feel the way that our bodies live in relation to these problems. When I think about people from my past or individuals I will encounter in the future I can feel my heart rate and breathing shift, I can feel my stomach turn and roll. The body understands in a way that already prefigures, or is, language.

One of these days I need to write more on Merleau-Ponty's chapter 'The Intertwining---The Chiasm.' It is such a remarkable piece of writing, and it demonstrates precisely what I am talking about: the body, as our privileged access point to reality, already gives us a way to understand the world as configured by language or as a kind of language. The world is made of wild logos, and we participate.

But how is it that the body responds to more and more fine-grained distinctions? Does the clarification of words really mean clarification of portions of the soul? When I learn the difference between jealousy and envy, do those experiences become more precise in my soul? When I learn to distinguish between comfort as confidence and comfort as resignation, do those distinctions register in my mind and body?

Did those things already exist, or has language brought them into being? The only reasonable answer is: both. Of course those experiences were already there, existing as confidence and resignation, and of course they have been given a new life when clarified.

Collingwood's theory of the imagination, expounded in his Principles of Art, makes precisely this claim. Relying on Hume's distinction between impressions and ideas, Collingwood argues that when we name a think accurately we both name it and transform it, we both discover it and invent it. But we invent it by giving it the name that it deserves or asks for.

Reality has to have layers, and these layers have to be able to show themselves as they are named, by their being named. This is in some ways what Heidegger's definition of phenomenology in Being and Time points towards: we wish to speak in a way that allows the beings to show themselves in themselves from themselves as themselves. We speak (logos) in a way that allows the things (phenomena) to show themselves.

In order for this to make sense, reality has to be the kind of thing that can be revealed. In order for reality to be able to be revealed reality must already be concealed. Heidegger is right on much of this.

Where he becomes frustrating is in his particular hermeneutic theory: a radical kind of poetic historicism.

I much prefer the hermeneutics advocated for by Leo Strauss and developed by Arthur Melzer. They argue for a type of 'esoteric' hermeneutics in which older texts have to be understood as written under the threat of political persecution. Esotericism as a hermeneutic also offers a potentially way to think of the issues I'm describing above: the way that layers of the soul are made apparent through proper naming of phenomena. Older writers had to worry about being murdered for expressing heterodox views in a way that is not true for writers after the French and American revolutions. Writers in the 20th and 21st centuries, too, have to worry. I recently saw that someone thinks Camus was killed by the KGB for his writing on the Soviet Union. This seems possible to me.

In order to write books and avoid persecution, older writers found away to 'write between the lines', or to communicate certain things to careful readers while hiding things from careless readers. Melzer explicates this very clearly in Philosophy Between the Lines. A careful reader, for example, will notice when a writer makes a substitution of a term, or misquotes another author. Plato's Socrates in the Republic, for example, radically conflates the philosopher and the gentleman in very strange ways at very peculiar moments. We know from reading Plato that he was a very careful writer, and that such a conflation is likely intentional. Older texts abound with these types of peculiarities, and we have to read them carefully and wonder whether or not they are purposeful guides to certain deeper questions of the text.

In addition to this defensive motivation, ancient and medieval philosophers also wrote this way to protect society from the potentially corrosive influence of philosophy. Society, after all, relies on prejudice, which philosophy generally doubts and degrades.

Modern philosophers also wrote in an esoteric fashion to wage wars of propaganda. The Enlightenment, on this view, is fundamentally a sophisticated and ongoing campaign of propaganda. Careful readings of Descartes reveal him to be a highly political thinker who obscured his teachings in the vale of pure metaphysics and theology. Richard Kennington knows how to show the way into these questions and Robert Roecklein offers great resources.






More interestingly, pre-modern philosophers (and potentially modern ones) wrote esoterically for pedagogical purposes. Philosophy cannot simply be communicated: you can't make a list of 'true things' and then hand it to a person and 'aha', they have the truth. Everyone has to do the work for themselves. Obscurity in texts then becomes a guide to thinking.

Connected to the question of pedagogical esotericism is metaphysical esotericism: a text needs to possess layers because reality possesses layers. This question of metaphysical esotericism, or the idea that reality possesses distinct layers, is related to the questions above about why it is that certain elements of experience can be clarified or made manifest by speaking about them carefully. Reality or experience knows when it has been named well. To observe something carefully involves naming that thing. Why would this be?

Older writers understood something like this, I think.

I regard this type of esoteric metaphysics and hermeneutics as a potential replacement for the notion of the unconscious. For the uncosncious is really just the wild logos of the world that reveals itself in our bodies, and can be revealed further by speaking of it carefully.

I'm far too tired to unpack this idea. Truthfully, this set of thoughts feels like the entire thing I have been trying to unpack for so long, and that I will likely be trying to unpack for so much longer. All of this is too condensed for others to make sense of. But I will think these thoughts more deeply at some point, perhaps even soon.

Thoughts on the So-Called 'Autonomy of Human Affairs': Nature and History in the Attempt to be a Responsible Human

My roommate and close friend is at the beginning of the graduate program that I recently completed: a master's in existential-phenomenological psychology. The program is philosophically grounded in Emmanuel Levinas' book Totality and Infinity. But Levinas, of course, was working principally in the wake of Heidegger. The first quarter of the program is spent reading in the neighborhood of existentialism and phenomenology: Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Buber, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Gadamer, Ricoeur, so on. The second quarter is dedicated to reading most of Totality and Infinity. At the same time course work is also being done on diagnosis, cross-cultural psychology, listening skills, therapeutic communication, etc.

The program is a wonderful thing. I learned a tremendous amount there, and felt very well clinically prepared to step into the world of therapy, if not entirely prepared for the realities of community mental health: case management, poverty, systemic violence, and the like.

The chief thing that impressed me in the program was encountering my body, or the depth of somatic, experiential, and embodied forms of psychotherapy. During my internship I was exposed to polyvagal theory and the basics of contemporary trauma research. I am still reading and reflecting on Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and the other pillars of the program, but I am more interested in pursuing different questions through different writers. I spent this morning, Saturday December 7th, reading the first 50 pages of Aristotle's De Anima. Yesterday during my lunch break I watched an interview with Stephen Porges, the main proponent of polyvagal theory. As I've mentioned in other places, putting together my reading of Plato and Aristotle with my understanding of contemporary trauma and biology research is my main interest right now.

My roommate told me he was surprised to see me going in that direction. I have, for many years, been speaking of what is often called 'the autonomy of human affairs,' or more dramatically, 'the autonomy of history from the methods of the natural sciences.' These phrases refer primarily to the impossibility of reducing human affairs to any deterministic or predictive scheme culled from the physics, chemistry, biology, or the social sciences (which are generally attempting to imitate the natural sciences). Indeed, my friend said that my engagement with biology made him anxious and fearful about the possibility of neuro-biological determinism. I understand that fear. I feel it resonate in my viscera as I reflect on it. Yet I don't feel seriously threatened by it: I have been reflecting for long enough on my life that I do not feel my actions can be seriously affected by those considerations. There is a relative autonomy to human affairs; I feel it in my life; and I believe it to be an entirely cogent argument. It cannot, however, be secured on the foundation attempted by Heidegger, Collingwood, or anyone else working within that neighborhood of thought.

My engagement with the natural sciences (i.e. polyvagal theory, trauma research, nervous systems, etc) is actually an attempt to ground the idea of the autonomy of human affairs through a different avenue. I am still trying to understand what it means to be a responsible person, and how to speak about political and moral things in clear ways that facilitate this responsible activity. I think Collingwood, Heidegger, Levinas, and others, have been involved in a similar task. For, as Collingwood argued, we have somehow lost our honor and our nerve, by which he meant the ability to act in a reasonable manner, and our unreflective belief that we are capable of doing so. Collingwood argued that it was generally modern natural science and particularly modern psychology that had robbed us of our honor and nerve. On this point I think Collingwood is fundamentally correct.

Something has happened during the modern period that has shaken our confidence in the ability of human reason to grapple with reality, our own activity included. Just read H.P. Lovecraft or other horror writers to get a taste of this dilemma: the modern natural sciences promised unlimited power, and all they have done is reveal our finitude. We are dumb animals floating in the void; far from the masterful beings dreamt of by the early modern founders.

I am reminded of a line from Strauss' "An Epilogue" that I admire and continually return to: "The sphere governed by prudence is then in principle self-sufficient or closed. Yet prudence is always endangered by false doctrines about the whole of which man is a part, by false theoretical opinions; prudence is therefore always in need of defense against such opinions, and that defense is necessarily theoretical. The theory defending prudence is, however, misunderstood if it is taken to be the basis of prudence.” There is, in other words, a self-sufficiency to human affairs: prudence, politics, and morality has its own grammar. But there are theoretical views that can threaten our ability to engage intelligently with the sphere of prudence.

Modern natural science has had such vitiating effects on our ability to engage in prudential activity. The thought that the universe is mechanistic, determined, dead, has prevented us from believing in the experience of 'freedom' that we seem to possess.

Many thinkers have perceived and written about these detrimental implications of the modern mechanistic natural sciences. The Romantic movement, initiated by Rousseau (from what I'm told), was one of the original progenitors of this rebellion. Somehow the rebellion against the implications of the modern natural sciences took the form of a dualism between nature and history. History, it was posited by Hegel and others, becomes a distinct domain of freedom apart from the necessary world of nature. Nature is determined; but history is where spirit, freedom lives. John Searle asks the question quite clearly in Making the Social World. To paraphrase, 'How do we get from electrons to elections and protons to presidents?' How, in other words can physical things give rise to political things?

In my final integration paper for grad school I argued that this distinction between nature and history persists to the present day, and appears in implicit and explicit forms in most existing forms of psychology. Nature and nurture. Nature and culture. Nature and X. These dualisms are everywhere.

This is indeed a tempting avenue for solving the dilemma of how the experience of human freedom can persist in a world that appears to be made strictly of physical things obeying the 'laws of nature'. The modern thinkers in hermeneutics, phenomenology history, so on, offer powerful critiques of the natural sciences, and do much work to help us come back to the reality of human experience.

My issue with them, however, is that they rarely explicitly challenge the modern understanding of nature as mechanistic. They generally acquiesce to an atomic metaphysics, ceding that they cannot speak to the reality of the universe, but only decide what it means to live meaningfully in a universe bereft of natural meaning. The desire to live meaningfully in a universe without natural meaning, however, leaves us in an awkward position: we are left to posit, assert, or will meaning into existence. Thus existentialism and existential psychology, in which I was trained, repeatedly uses a phrase that I find horrifying and untrue: meaning making. I do not feel as if though I 'make' or 'create' meaning. I am in the grips of meaning. It overtakes me. I am in the midst of the logos, not its source.

This generally willful character of the historical school is perfectly aligned with a deeper layer of the modern mechanistic sciences. For, as I understand them, the modern mechanistic sciences were never meant to be an accurate ontology or to provide insight into human nature. They were intended to enable a project of mastering nature that was meant to serve political ends. Robert Roecklein is the philosopher who has helped me see this most clearly. But Strauss is all over these questions, as is Richard Kennington, Paul Rahe, Caroline Merchant, and many others.

If the modern sciences were meant as tools of mastery rather than accurate accounts of what we are, then on what basis do we posit a domain of history as distinct from nature in which freedom lives? Shouldn't we, instead, go back to the early modern redefinition of nature, and try to understand where things went wrong there?

If the fundamental issue is that the modern conception of nature doesn't enable serious reflection on human affairs, then why are we busy positing history as an autonomous domain of human freedom? Shouldn't we just go back to this redefinition, see what was lost, and ask ourselves if there are other ways of thinking of nature that would enable us to reflect seriously on ourselves?

My wager is that something like the autonomy of human affairs can be approached more seriously simply by thinking through the problem of nature, rather than by doubling-down on the distinction between nature and history.

This is why I am reading polyvagal theory, looking into trauma, and engaging with my body as a somatically oriented therapist and person. These are contemporary excursions into the nervous system, trauma, and the body, in other words, can guide us towards an understanding of nature that is different from the mechanistic view that has proved so detrimental to reflection on human affairs. The body, understood properly, leads to a teleological understanding of nature and thereby to a version of the autonomy of human affairs.

Indeed, prior to the early modern redefinition of nature, teleology was the prevailing view of nature. Glancing at Spinoza some time ago I was amazed to see how explicitly he was attacking the notion of teleology; and Descartes was admittedly in the business of refuting Aristotle's teleological understanding of nature. There are contemporaries advocating for teleology: Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos has been hugely influential on me, and guides the way through the contemporary nonsense.

Teleology is a fancy word, but all it means is that goodness has a real existence in nature, and that every animal, every living thing, is in the business of pursuing what is good for it by nature. My dad once playfully asked me in an e-mail: 'Hey, are worms mechanistic or teleological animals? Neither brah, It's a fucking worm. I did get banana bread at work today though. ' He read my integration paper, which is occupied mainly with this distinction between mechanism and teleology. I replied: 'They are teleological for sure! Ie "what's good for a worm?" is a totally intelligible question, and the best way to find out is by watching worms worm!' He found this helpful: 'Your answer to the worm question is a perfect way for me to understand what teleology means. Onwards and upwards. Love you, Dad.'

A teleological conception of nature requires a certain account of the species. On a mechanistic or atomistic account the species is an illusion, the deeper reality being the undulating and transforming genetic material, the bits. The species, as a natural form, is called into doubt. As John Gray says in Straw Dogs, Darwin's teaching implies that the species is less real, or not real at all, and that it will be carried away in the flow of time.

If the species can be shown to have a deeper reality, and if each species is defined in large part by the ends or goods that that species pursues, then we have a potential basis for reflection on human things. Indeed, the analysis of teleology I am working on is not so much about ontology or metaphysics (though it is about that), but it is about securing a basis for reflection on human things. For if we can take seriously the idea that the species is real, and that species need to be reflected on as possessing unique goods, then several features of the human species become salient. Namely, we are animals that are rational and political by nature. We possess, in a sense, a split nature. Our rationality and our politicality come into conflict with one another. The misological character of society, the split between politics and philosophy, becomes a feature of our nature, not a bug. The Enlightenment in this sense is hostile to human nature as the ancients understood it.

This view of human nature, as divided between rationality and politicality, is what I've learned to call the tragic view of nature. Our nature doesn't fit together. We are monsters, composites. Polyvagal theory puts meat on this claim: we hold our entire phylogenetic history in our bodies. The vagas nerve shows our reptilian and mammalian ancestry. We are not human, pure and simple. We are achieving humanity all the time.

Polyvagal theory, trauma research, body work, all offer avenues to a teleological understanding of nature. I think Gendlin was onto this, although I've never seen him use the world teleology. I suspect it wasn't a creative enough term for him.

This is the significance of what I'm after with this work in the contemporary natural sciences. I see in them a possible alternative way of thinking of the 'autonomy of human affairs'. But it is not an autonomy grounded on the untenable distinction between nature and history. It is a grounding instead in a conception of nature that is pluralistic enough to admit the legitimacy of the species. It is worth noting that the Greek word 'eidos' could mean 'form', 'essence', 'type', or 'species'. It could also mean 'appearance' or 'looks' or surface appearance of a thing. The question of form goes so deep. What the hell are natural forms? Why do trees grow the way they do, and why do certain things help them grow when others don't?

Atomism denies the reality of form. It argues that form is only the form of the smallest things. Of course there is a human form, a human species, a human nature. Such a conception of nature that makes this possible also makes possible reflection on what is good for us.

I am so worked up by this writing. I am so tired. It is 7:35 pm on 12/12. I fly home to see my family in 8 days and I am looking forward to it. But good god the dark is getting to me.

I feel so much stirring in these thoughts. These are the implications of my final paper in graduate school. This is the essence of my alternative to what that program offered me. It offered me so much. And I offer these thoughts as a compliment to that project.

Keir and I agreed our project is still to move beyond Heidegger. He is the giant of the twentieth century, 'a real fucking philosopher,' as Keir recently said to me. I will soon be reading his "Question Concerning Technology," where he apparently takes on the question of teleology.

I also want this to connect back to a question of the deeper meaning of esotericism as a hermeneutic. Reality has layers. We can feel them in our body. That is perhaps the next thing I hope to write on here.

All of this needs to take form.