Layered Texts, Conflicted Souls, Hidden Nature: What's This Unity of Hermeneutics, Psychology, Politics, and Metaphysics? Thoughts on the Limits of 'Esotericism'

I am so eager to write about something that I do not understand adequately. When I pause to reflect on it I find myself in the midst of the largest philosophical and psychological problems I am aware of.

The problems concern the relation between hermeneutics, psychology, politics, and metaphysics (or ontology).

Hermeneutics provides the most striking entry point: Leo Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing and everything else he ever wrote) and Arthur Melzer (Philosophy Between the Lines) have convincingly demonstrated that our era is unique in that we have lost touch with an ancient and abiding rhetorical practice known as 'esoteric writing'. Esoteric writing concerns the relationship between philosophy and society, and the relationship between truth (or nature) and language.

Pre-modern philosophers were consistently under the threat of persecution and censorship. Consequently, they could not openly discuss their more heterodox ideas, lest they open themselves to threat of death. Philosophers thus developed a rhetorical style in which they could communicate things to careful readers, and hide things from careless readers. Ways of tipping off the right kind of reader include: Purposeful mistakes and misquotations, long digressions, abrupt transitions, oblique prefatory notes, anonymous publishing, and so on. Annabel Patterson, a renowned literary historian, also demonstrates the existence of these rhetorical strategies in her book Censorship and Interpretation.

Esoteric writing is a hermeneutic strategy that above all demonstrates that great writers in all eras possessed a deep awareness of text and sub-text, surface and depth.

The implications of esotericism are vast simply in the world of philology and scholarship. If it is true that authors were forced to write in encoded ways due to the threat of censorship and persecution, and if it is true that we have forgotten how to read this way, than much contemporary scholarship needs to be revised.

But there are also deep implications in the world of psychology, politics, and metaphysics (or ontology)

Psychologically, it puts us face to face with a divide that sits at the center of our souls: we are, as human beings, often divided between, on the one hand, our allegiance to our political communities and the opinions that bring them, and on the other, to the truth or the reality of things regardless of their implications for our political communities. The love of one's own and the love of the good are often at odds.

I often say that I am interested in the psychology of conformity. Because in order to get by in our daily lives, in order to be what we are, we must conform to social roles and standards. But we are more than the roles and the standards. Yet we cannot live in this excess only. We must live as a fusion of role and life; structure and growth. We must, in Collingwood's phrase, be vertebrates.

Esotericism thus describes also the structure of our souls: we are a surface of social form, role, structure; and this surface always obscures, supports, and reveals a depth. The task is to become a surface that is the surface of a depth.

This puts us face to face with the political dimension of esotericism. The implication I would draw from the esoteric tradition is this: Society is inherently violent. It always coerces, it always shapes, it always enforces and forces us into a given shape. Unfortunately we are not able to absent from this violence. This violence is a precondition of our being.

All life and growth is also violent. Growth is the fulfilling of certain possibilities. Violence is the denying of certain possibilities. It is impossible for us to fulfill certain possibilities without denying others. Ergo growth requires violence. But some forms of growth are less violent than others because they fulfill our nature more full or 'fit' us better. Esotericism, in a peculiar sense, is a practice that mitigates the necessary violence of social life; it dampens and enlivens the conformity that, if left unchecked by the life of our lives, would transform us into cogs.

The most peculiar implication of the esoteric tradition relates to all of this, and is the most obscure to me.

I will refer to it as metaphysical esotericism (following Benardete). Metaphysical esotericism refers to the fact that reality itself seems to possess the structure of surface and depth. Phenomenology, in Heidegger's sense, can become ontology because there is a depth in the world that responds to the surface formulations of language. Merleau-Ponty says that 'to be is to be the surface of a depth'. No matter what facet of reality we look at, it always seems as it things appear a way, and are a way. The world unfolds from itself.

There is some sort of developmentalist ontology implied in this, one that I don't want to call historicism.

Our being as political animals, divided psychologically, finding ways of writing that mitigate the violence of society by navigating the relation between surface and depth, wouldn't be possible unless the world also possessed the structure of surface and depth.

The practice of philosophy, which is identical with esotericism, is the practice of learning that the surface depth relation that gives rise to philosophy (the discovery of nature) is identical in structure to reality itself.

I cannot say more. I am baffled by these problems.

But I like this formulation: the task of philosophy is to become the surface of a depth; and esotericism is precisely training in becoming the surface of a depth.

The link between ontology and politics is so real.

Our own waking up into the dilemma of philosophy, the ascent from political opinion to knowledge, becomes a guide to the nature of nature: Ie the movement and permanent relation between surface and depth, being bound to temporality, incompleteness and unfolding... Quid sit deus?

From Sacrifice to Duty Through Unconscious Fantasy as it Shows itself in the Body

The title demonstrates the trajectory of thought that I intend to trace here. I do not intend to do much more than sketch said trajectory. It is Friday evening. My working, reading, learning, and acting feel strained. I continue my study of DuBois and Douglass. I have just received Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans in the mail, along with Leo Strauss' The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. I continue to be divided.

I begin with the problem of sacrifice. I speak of sacrifice in a very broad sense, but generally denoting the way that human life lacks harmony. We are composite both interpersonally and intrapsychically: we are many, both as we appear in society, and as we appear within ourselves. In order to manage this many-ness, we must make sacrifices: we live and (hopefully) choose among options, both interpersonally or intrapsychically.

Interpersonally, or socially, we occupy many roles throughout our lives and even on a single day. Monday through Friday 830-5, I am a therapist, case manager, coworker, employee, (or 'team member' if I want to abide by the language that my employers use to obscure the hierarchical relations between use), and many other things. During that time I may also be a customer, a pedestrian, an acquaintance, a friend (and what myriad things go into being these things?) Outside of those hours I am a roommate, a friend, a son, a brother, an image on a screen (both for myself and others). Roles roles roles, abound.

Intrapsychically, or within myself, I am also many. Both Plato and Freud thought it sensical, or at least expedient, to divide the soul in three: nutritive, spirited, and rational, for Plato; Id, Ego, and Superego for Freud. I grasp neither of these tripartite divisions sufficiently. But they point to an intuitive enough set of divisions within the soul: I recognize a part of myself that can think clearly; I recognize a part of myself that acts and 'thinks' at a level 'deeper than my thinking; and beneath all that my heart beats, my stomach digests, my body sleeps, heals, and cares for itself in a way that is deeper and more automatic than both my rational thinking and my semi-conscious bodily activity.

Socially, I fill roles, and am therefore both one and many.

Within myself, I am rational, habitual, and nutritive (physiological, automatically biological), and am therefor both one and many. (I imagine a particular friend, and others, who may take issue with the claim that we are one at all. I think this a signficiant but not insurmountable claim and bracket it here).

To make our way in the world as these composite beings we have to make sacrifices. Socially, we have to decide that we want to go to this school as opposed to that school; fill this role rather than that role; pursue this relationship rather than that relationship. Intrapsychically, we have to choose that this hobby is more important than that; this set of emotions worth honoring more than that; this 'part of myself' more worth nurturing than that.

I believe that the problem of sacrifice is unavoidable for we composite beings.

If we are lucky, our sacrifices can become duties. By duty I mean something like: "the sacrifices we are happy to make." R.G. Collingwood, my first great philosophical love, elaborates his notion of duty in rich and concise ways, chiefly in The New Leviathan, but by other names in The Idea of History and other places. Duty, for him, is the act that is both possible and necessary, that speaks itself chiefly in the form of tautology: 'This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do.'

When we understand the situation that we are in, which includes our roles and what transcends them, and the parts of ourselves and what transcends them, we find that the situation is compulsory. We have choices, naturally. But the way to choose is not simply by choosing capriciously or following some overriding instinct. The most sound form of choice is rather to understand the situation and to understand ourselves, and to listen to the logos latent in the situation and in ourselves as deeply as possible.

If we have listened to the situation deeply enough, if we have sufficiently communed with the logos present in our situation and in ourselves, we will find that there is a 'best' option for us. This 'best' option will still involve sacrifices, both socially and intrapsychically. But it will no longer be a burdensome sacrifice: it will be the sacrifice we are happy to make.

To deny the possibility of duty is to be captive to the fiction that the human being can be a god: that we can make our way in the world without compromising, without fitting ourselves in relation to others and to other parts of ourselves.

How does one know what is a sacrifice and what is a duty?

I am interested in a possible answer from Jonathan Lear's wonderful lectures in A Case for Irony.

In the first lecture Lear defines irony as a form of 'erotic uncanniness', meaning that irony seizes us in moments when the familiar has become unfamiliar, when we experience the uncanny. But in the moment of this dislocation we are not left in the void, as our modern sensibilities might lead us to suppose. Rather, we are left erotically charged, longing for the truth about the thing that, moments ago, we thought we knew. Socrates, Lear claims, was ironic in this sense.

This is why Lear claims that irony shows itself most clearly in the form of tautology. "Among all the therapists, are there any therapists?" In the first instance the word stands for the socially available roles that are available to us as a matter of course. In the second instance the word points to a deeper possibility reality, ie therapist not as social role, but therapist as genuinely healing person. The tautological question, 'among the therapists, are there any therapists,' can thus be rephrased: 'Among all those who occupy the socially designated role of therapist, do any of them function as agents (persons, sources, sites) of healing?' The answer is surely yes, but my point isn't the answer. My concern is with this notion of irony.

In the second lecture Lear argues that this species of irony, as erotic uncanniness, is particularly significant in light of the human search for wholeness. Lear claims that we are generally given unrealistic and simplified images of life's harmony and the possibility for wholeness. In my master's thesis I made a similar claim, railing against Carl Rogers' and others' calls for 'congruence' and authenticity. These words point to real things. But Lear is on point when he claims "Ironically, the unity that is available to us is a peculiar form of disunity. In trying to work out the family of concepts that include rational will, action, and agency, philosophers have tended to rely on an idealized conception of unity that does not really fit the human soul." This is akin to the point I made from the outset concerning manyness and sacrifice: we cannot simply be whole. We are many, in many ways.

Lear believes that it is precisely our need to occupy social roles, and our need to fragment ourselves psychologically, that leads to this disunity that is our source of unity. The word sacrifice, however, occupies no significant place in Lear's analysis; it appears only once in relation to his depiction of Plato's Republic, where a character exits to make a literal animal sacrifice. Yet I find the notion implicit all over Lear's book.

Lear goes on to argue that 'unconscious fantasy' is one of the best places for psychic unity to emerge, in the peculiar way that it is possible for us. I don't understand this sufficiently, and I'm tired, so here is my best shot right now. Lear argues that 'individual formal causes' show themselves most clearly in the workings of unconscious fantasy. When we can allow ourselves, through dreams, or through psychoanalytic speech, to give voice to unconscious fantasy, we will encounter a sort of individual entelechy, a self-organizing care that is internally generated internally by the soul or organism. "The claim then is that the self tends to have a formal cause, unrecognized as such, which stands at significant odds with the conscious sense of practical identity."

If it is possible for us to have duties, rather than mere sacrifices, then something like this internal formal cause, this internal directedness, is necessary. If there were no internal formal causes, if I weren't 'a particular type of critter, with particular natural ends', then I would just be some malleable thing that social roles and intrapsychic organizations can just be imposed upon.

Why do certain roles fit better than others? Why do certain ways of relating to myself feel better than others? Why, in short, do I seem to have ends that are native to my particular being and not just the being of my species?

What Lear is talking about, then, is the discovery of duty as opposed to sacrifice. Because, again, these internal formal causes cannot just show themselves, willy nilly, without social form. We require social form. But certain forms are better. Why? I don't know why. But that seems to be what nature is, and it seems that we can listen to our natures.

I think Lear is onto something significant that is fundamentally correct. But I want to argue that 'unconscious fantasy' needs to be understood as emerging from a particular relation with 'embodied life', in a peculiar sense of embodied.

Here I follow the lead of Eugene Gendlin, who I am still hard at work on. Gendlin developed a somatically informed mode of thought that he referred to as 'focusing' and 'thinking at the edge'. Gendlin argues that words, or formulations, are most true if they correspond to an intuitively felt sense of things. Words don't just mean what they mean; words what they mean in situations. When I say the word 'slab', I may mean many different things, and the word functions in different situations in different ways.

If we want to follow our unconscious fantasies so as to understand our own unique entelechy, we need to listen to our bodies in the way Gendlin describes in Focusing and basically in every single one of his writings.

I am done.

We are many, never one. We are many in many ways. To navigate our many-ness means we must make sacrifices. But there is a unique species of sacrifice that is known as duty. A duty is a sacrifice we are happy to make because it accords with our nature. The best way to know our duties, or our internal formal causes, is to listen to the unconscious fantasies, as Lear puts it. And unconscious fantasy must be attended to in the experience of the body as Gendlin describes it.

Okay thanks bye I'll flesh this all out some day when I'm not so tired.

But I am convinced of the soundness of this trajectory.

A Fragment: Mastery, Spurious and Genuine: Ontology, Phenomenology, and Nature

I began this writing several months ago when I was excited about a conversation my friend Keir and I were having about the Platonic Forms. The question of 'form' of Plato's work on 'forms' has occupied us more intensely over the last year or two. The idea, roughly, was that the forms constitute some kind of weird navigating of the relationship between phenomenology and ontology, between what the world is like for us and what the world is. I don't think I can really return to this writing. Although I am still working on formulating the same problems in different ways.

Begin Writing:

My desire to write is stronger than my ability to write adequately about what I want to write about. "Don't write because you understand, write because you don't," I recently said to a friend. I'm trying to follow my own advice.

I want to write about different forms of 'mastery' as they present themselves in different threads of Western philosophy. My concern is how these different forms of mastery show themselves in the relationship between ontology and phenomenology. All philosophy, perhaps all thought, implicitly or explicitly answers the questions: 'What is the world?' and 'What is it like for us to be in the world?'. I mean to use the terms ontology and phenomenology in minimally presuppositional ways; they stand for those questions, respectively. Much follows from these questions, and even more follows from the relationship between these two questions.

Some background:

My final project for my master's in existential-phenomenological psychology was concerned with a legacy of 'mastery' that pervades contemporary philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. I argued that a crucial feature of modernity was, among other things, a new form of science that sought to master the physical world largely for the sake of a political program of weakening the rule of the Catholic church. The early modern founders (Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza) sought to change the political landscape in ways that previous philosophers had never attempted. This forced science/philosophy to pursue practical purposes in a novel way. Philosophy, consequently, lost its contemplative character that predominated in pre-modern and ancient philosophy, and became expressly activistic, preoccupied with effecting change rather than pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

This effort to use science and philosophy to change the world is admirable and has led to many good things. I am no anti-modern, luddite, or the like. Yet there is no denying that the last several hundred years has seen the world radically transformed in not entirely positive ways. Science and technology leave us with an mixed bag.

What are the implications for this legacy of technological mastery in the present moment? How does it affect our ability to be human? How does it affect our ability to think about and act in relation to political things?

My sense is that the modern project of mastery splits off into two distinct forms that correspond to the contemporary analytic and continental traditions. These two forms of mastery correspond to different emphases on the relationship between ontology, phenomenology, and the meaning of nature.

The first form of mastery belongs to the analytic tradition of philosophy, privileges ontology to the point of denigrating or ignoring phenomenology, and regards nature as atomistic or materialistic. Analytic mastery is technical in character, and resembles the early modern project of mastering nature through material science and technological invention.

The second form of mastery belongs to the continental tradition, privileges phenomenology to the point of denigrating or ignoring ontology, and regards nature as secondary to 'history' in various senses of that word. The mastery of the continental tradition is poetic in character, and shows itself as an exaggerated conception of freedom in which the human being is essentially a 'creative' being that knows no reality other than the reality it creates.

Both forms of mastery show themselves in the longing for godhood, or the desire for control. The analytic god is a god of technological might; the continental god is a god of creative potency.

I regard both of these concepts of mastery as spurious.

This is oversimplifying, as I am aware of writers in both of these traditions that break from what I am describing. But I think this is an instructive way to oversimplify.

I also think there is another notion of mastery that is discernible from the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. I regard this classical view of mastery as genuine mastery, as opposed to the spurious forms of mastery present in the analytic and continental traditions. It is not technical or poetic, but rather relational, dialogical, tragic, and political (in a particular or proper sense). It does not emphasize ontology or phenomenology, but seeks to navigate a middle path between these two questions. It does not regard nature as materialistic, and it does not posit history as a distinct domain over and against history, but regards nature as teleological and thereby relies on an analysis of the human being as an animal that is both rational and political,  and that must reckon with unique forms of goodness intrinsic to our rationality and politicality. The classical form of mastery would operate not with an image of a technician or a poet, but rather an inn-keeper. Here I think of Gendlin and Rumi: 'All your feelings/experiences/emotions are guests in your home and you must greet them and find a place for them.' The part of the mind that 'greets and finds a place for,' the inn-keeper, is the proper image of classical mastery. The inn-keeper, moreover, is not a god, but a daemon, a being that navigates the in-between of our humanness and the way our humanness reaches out towards the divine.

It is important to emphasize the moderate character of classical mastery because control and mastery are important terms that have non-pejorative meanings. I believe the spirit of control that belongs to analytic and continental forms of mastery is excessive, unhealthy, and unrealistic. They are spurious forms of mastery that do not sufficiently coincide with knowledge of our nature; they offer distorted images of human nature and thereby give rise to forms of mastery that are not germane to our being. Classical mastery, by contrast, is appropriate to our nature as animals that are both rational and political, and do not rely on distorted understandings of the affinity between humans and gods.

All of this can be expressed in a grid:

Tradition:          Emphasis:               Idea of Nature:              Form of Mastery:      Divine Image:

Analytic            Ontology                 Mechanistic or Atomistic     Technological          Crafting-God

Continental       Phenomenology      History over Nature              Poetic                          Artist-God

Classical           Middle Path of        Teleology and Tragedy         Political or                   Daemonic
                          Being and Seeming                                              Dialogical            Inn-Keeper

What I really want to understand is the possibility for the words 'metaphysics' to stand for a careful navigation of the relationship between ontology and phenomenology. Plato and Aristotle, as I understand them (so far), find a way to navigate the difficult space between 'what is the world?' and 'what is the world like for us?'. It only seems reasonable to me to assume that how we answer one of these questions has implications for the other. And it seems obvious to me that these questions have to be mutually-governing: i.e. what the world is has to have something to do with what the world is like for us and vice versa.

Let me discuss these different traditions and forms of mastery in turn: analytic, continental, and classical

Analytic Mastery: Nature, Technology, and Domination
- it coincides most fully with the early modern project
- it gives rise both to projects of actual technological mastery, ie behaviorism and transhumanism, and of conceptual mastery and the degradation of phenomenology ie eliminativism


Continental Mastery: History, Poetry, and Creation
- it is related to but separate from the original project of mastery.... the relationship between materialism and the meaning of history as a placeholder for the human-divine relation
- something to do with the intertwining of the biblical and philosophical tradition

Genuine Mastery: Rationality and Politicality; Coercion, Rhetoric, and Esotericism; Multiplicity of Roles, Internal and External, and being the Inn-Keeper
- the meaning of daimonic
- the meaning of being both rational and political
- the meaning of teleology and species specific issues
- Trauma and the species account of flourishing and violence... the relative character of trauma, and the necessity of trauma for a being like us that always has competing forms of goodness within it
- the esoteric tradition as offering the skills needs... healthy dissociation, healthy compartmentalization.

The problems of coercion, rhetoric, esotericism...

On the Compulsory Quality of Performance and the Performative Quality of Life

I went to drama camp from the ages of 7-12. I did not know it was drama camp. We put on little performances, skits, music numbers. We would spend 3 weeks preparing, and at the end we would perform for the parents and family members.

Performance has a peculiar quality of compulsion to it. Once you begin giving your monologue, begin your speech or speaking your lines, you cannot stop except at the cost of some violence. Imagine an actor in the middle of a play. They break character, "I can't do this." They walk off stage. The room freezes. No one on the stage knows what to do.

'The show must go on.'

But when the show doesn't go on, we feel it, this interruption, this disruption.

The machine grinds to a halt. It would have been smoother for the show to go on.

Our entire lives have this quality. We step into our characters, slowly, gradually, over the course of our lives. Major shifts in character come at a price.

Imagine a person dropping their role in the middle of a barista shift. There is a line to the door. It is hot, they are tired. "I can't do this anymore." They walk out. I once saw a coworker have a panic attack in the middle of a giant line. They took a minute.

What is this compulsory quality that overtakes our lives? What is this character that we can't stop acting out?

'The show must go on.'

But this isn't a show. This is my life.

That this is my life doesn't change the facts:

'The show must go on.'

"It's About Me..." Thoughts on My Current Project, the First Day of Kindergarten, My Privilege, Douglass and Write

I have been having a hard time with the isolation of the pandemic. I am all too keenly aware of how fortunate I am to have a home, to have a job, to have a paycheck. My job brings me into contact with many people who do not have homes, jobs, or paychecks. The regime is currently attempting to sacrifice them in the name of the economy.

I was recently in the shower when I began wondering about why I am writing and reading and thinking about the things I am. The single word I am most interested in right now is 'coercion'. Other relevant words: violence, conformity, compulsion, roles, belonging, attribution (thanks, Laing), compliance.

To be a political animal is to be subject to psychical and physical 'pressures' that 'shape' us into certain ways of being. Freud is right to emphasize intrapsychic conflict. We are rife with it.

Why am I so preoccupied with violence? I studied military history as an undergraduate. I sought out work in forensic mental health. I have been feverishly reading political philosophy for more than 10 years.

'Why am I writing about these things in this way?' I thought to myself in the shower.

'It's about me', I said aloud to myself.

Then I cried really hard for a while. As I was crying I was flooded with memories of the first day of kindergarten. I remember the fear, the anxiety, the crying, the desire to hide behind Dad's legs.

The memory was viscerally rich and imagistically sparse: 'Don't make me go there. I don't want to go there'. I said this aloud and I understood. I felt it.

Of course the writing is about me. Of course I experienced coercive elements of school. Of course it hurt to be pushed into an institution, to be forced out of the home, because my parents had to go to work. Of course I cried and it hurt.

Of course my parents experienced this violence before me, and in their hurt I became hurt too.

Hurt people hurt people. And we are all hurting in one way or another.

And I am among the most privileged individuals in the world. A white man born in the United States in a period of profound prosperity. How is it that I have experienced this much social coercion? How is it that I have been shaped in such palpable ways? How is it that I can sob and sob and sob in the shower upon realizing that my preoccupation with coercion and violence is my attempt to come to terms with myself?

How?

How must the violence experienced by the less fortunate, the poor, people of color, women and queer folks, how must that violence affect them?

I have spent so much time in the last number of years reflecting on the process of skillful conformity, or how to navigate coercive situations (i.e. all human situations) in a way that preserves what it is that is worth preserving in me?

I am currently rereading The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass with an eye to these questions. For the more I have read the most serious black authors of the last several hundred years (Davis, Baldwin, Douglass, Write), the more I see how much they understood, had to understand, the need for skillful conformity.

Skillful conformity is in some ways a process of dissimulation: of projecting a front, a cover, a surface, in order to obscure a depth, a soul. Douglass says that as a young man, still a slave, the slaves around him all competed to be able to work at 'The Great House Farm', the property where the big slave-owner lived. The work in the Great House Farm was preferable to the brutal work of the fields.
"The competitors for this office," Douglass writes, "sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd's slaves, as are seen in the slaves of the political parties." A doubleness emerges.

Douglass claims that these slaves sang enthusiastically on their way to the Great House Farm. Their songs, he said, would be strange to those on the outside, for they "would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone." These songs, Douglass says, contained "words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves." He admits that he himself found them strange: "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension.... Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains."

Douglass further claims that many in the North mistakenly took the existence of slave songs "as evidence of their contentment and happiness." Nonsense, Douglass retorts. "It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears." In this way, the songs, with their seeming interplay between surface and depth, content and form, exoteric and esoteric, were a way for slaves to resist "the soul-killing effects of slavery..."

Some sort of doubleness emerges from the experience of oppression, slavery, brutality, violence. I recoil at the idea that my experience could possibly ever be compared to what I read about in Douglass and others. I have cried every time I have read Douglass. There is no equating. But there is learning. And the extreme violence that Douglass experienced is pervasive at most levels of society. Only the super wealthy, or the divine, are free from these pressures. The super wealthy, I suspect, are slaves in a different sense: slaves to their greed; slaves to their distorted understanding of goodness; slaves to the idolatry of money.

Richard Write describes a comparable type of doubleness in his narrative preface to Uncle Tom's Children. He describes a process whereby white co-workers forced him into his role as 'lesser'. They accused Write of calling one of them 'Pease' as opposed to 'Mr. Pease'. Write was immediately caught in a double-bind. If he denied their claim he was in essence calling these men liars. If he assented to the claim he was agreeing that he had disrespected them. There was no way out. The only option was to assent to power.

Write tried to explain the incident to the people at home they admonished him: "they called me a fool. They told me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are working for white folks, they said, you got to 'stay in your place' if you want to keep working." Write refers to this process of learning to 'play his role' as his 'Jim Crow Education'. Here I mean the phrase 'play his role' in a peculiar sense. Because Write did not simply cease learning; he continued to think, to try and read, to write. But in order to do so he had to conform, he had to shape himself to fit the images of his oppressors. "Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live." This was the price of his learning, his growth, his excess.

All of us necessarily exceed our roles. We are more than these truncated parts in society. The question is whether or not we are given leeway, wiggle room, space, to learn about what is more than our roles. Thus Write used his cunning to continue to learn, to exceed, in private, clandestinely. "Armed with a library card, I obtained books in the following manner: I would write a note to the librarian, saying: 'Please let this n***** boy have the following books." I would then sign it with the white man's name." Absolutely remarkable. Absolutely heart rending. I write with tearful eyes and tight lips.

I am so much freer than Douglass or Write ever was. This is my privilege.

Yet I experience violence. I experience coercion. I also must get up, go to work, and conform. But I thank God that I am afforded the excess. I do push against my role. And, unlike Write, I am not punched in the face and threatened with a steel bar. My fragile body and soul are not subjected in the same way; but I am subjected nonetheless; my subjectivity is crafted.

I need practices that allow me to preserve my excess from being devastated by the shaping power of institutions. I remember so viscerally sobbing as I was taken to kindergarten against my wishes. And I was cared for there! I was allowed to nap! I remember raising my hand for more tasty food that was served to me! It was so good for me. And yet I'm crying as I write this.

I am in want of practices that can preserve souls from the coercive effects of institutions and societies.

Doubleness, dissimulation, occupying the level of role and excess simultaneously, is the most imperative task if I am to continue to navigate this place, the world, America, Earth, history, whatever.

The most complex theoretical accounts of this phenomena are to be found in the tradition of esoteric writing initiated by Leo Strauss and deepened most significantly by Arthur Melzer; and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. I am currently working on combining these two views.

Gendlin, however, is wrong when he claims that the 'excess' or 'intricacy' is a discovery of our century. Douglass and Write understood the intricacy. All people who have hoped to be thoughtful in the company of others have understood the intricacy, or the need to conform if one is to think.

I am becoming more and more grounded in my desire to seek justice, to try to help, to try and do something in the face of all this.

There is a quotation I am trying to recall, but it escapes me. I paraphrase:

'If one wants to be free, one must fix as clearly as possible upon the ways in which one is enslaved.'

I am not enslaved. I am freer than most have ever been in the history of the world. But for my sake, and for the sake of clarifying the things I hope to work on, I am attempting to understand all of the forms of compulsion that rack my body, and the subtle cruelties that could make the first day of kindergarten an occasion worthy of tears.

Cartesian Intricacy: Or the Problem with Gendlin's Account of Modernity

I continue to be preoccupied with Descartes. It has been many years. 2006 that I first read the Meditations.

I go deeper into my preoccupation with Eugene Gendlin. I first heard of him in September of 2017.

A sound interpretation of Descartes is an important element in the task of making sense of Gendlin's work, its implications for our situation, and how to carry his work forward.

Ultimately, I take issue with Gendlin's analysis of the meaning of modernity. Descartes is often said to be 'the father of modern philosophy' or some other such statement.

Modernity, since Heidegger, becomes synonymous with forgetting: something is amiss, we are missing something, about ourselves, the world... what have we lost? And how do we get it back? Heidegger's answer is quite famous: We have lost the question of Being, we speak only of beings. The question of Being was obscured chiefly by Plato's profound and complex answers to these questions. With Plato and beyond the Western tradition is fundamentally locked into 'metaphysics', or technical analyses that make unjustified and unjustifiable presuppositions about Being, thinking, and their relation. Heidegger's account, I think, suffers from a failure to appreciate the significance of irony in ancient writers. The technical analyses of Plato's Republic cannot be taken at face value. They must be understood as belonging to the highly tactful, rhetorical, situated quality of Socratic speech. Heidegger, in short, failed to understand the relationship between irony, philosophy, and politics.

Gendlin's account of modernity is also an account of forgetting. In Gendlin's case, however, we have forgotten not Being, but 'implicit intricacy'. We have become convinced, he says, that 'all order is imposed order', that there is no such thing as 'nature'. Gendlin in this way was addressing the postmodern conviction that human beings are culturally constituted, pure and simple.

Gendlin tells a story in which the intricate order was forgotten in the progress of the modern project. Descartes, he says, knew that there was a 'wider order' in addition to the logical or symbolic orders. Yet, Gendlin claims, Descartes advocated for the imposition of mathematical order for the sake of usefulness. "Yeah yeah this mathematical grid isn't in accordance with this thing's nature, but I don't care. The mathematical grid allows me to master it, reduce it to its usefulness in my schemes."

It isn't until after Rousseau that the intricate order slips from view, and we begin to regard all order as imposed order. "With Rousseau the natural order has its last moment," Gendlin writes in Thinking Beyond Patterns (43). It is with Kant's response to Rousseau that we begin to lose the intricate order altogether. According to Gendlin, Kant wanted to understand how the hypothetical sciences could be so successful: Why does the imposition of order seem to work? He answered rhe question with a reversal: "The order we impose is the objective one, he said, because the same order is imposed not just in thought, but also on experience. All order found in experience is put there in the very making of experience. Nature is a product of our thought-forms." (TBP 44).

Kant is unfortunately still a blind spot for me, having glanced at the Prolegomena and read the introduction to the second Critique. The second Critique gave me enough of a sense of the truth of Gendlin's arguments. Kant admits that the attempt ground metaphysics in speculative or theoretical reason failed. He will now attempt to ground metaphysics in our experience of practical reason. The primacy of practical reason can potentially be interpreted as asserting that there are no existing external measures: Man is the measure of all things. (I am currently reading Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates takes up the Protagorian claim that 'man is the measure of all things'. Plato saw quite clearly the possibility of an ontology based on flux, becoming, imposition, the impossibility of saying what 'is'. As Gendlin knew, Plato already knew about these problems).

I think Gendlin is generally on the right track with his account of the imposed order. Clearly prior to Kant and Hegel there wasn't so much absurd denial of a natural order. Something happened here, no doubt. And naturally Gendlin is right that this transforms through Nietzsche and the romantics, again in Heidegger and phenomenology. Gendlin and Strauss both agree that posistivism and historicism are the chief antagonists of sound rationality, or philosophy, in our time. And both of them would agree that they share a common root: the unit model, materialism, or atomism.

But there is a crucial political dimension that I think Gendlin is missing. Because the significance of 'imposed order' in the early modern period needs to be understood as a type of effective or Machiavellian metaphysics. I write about this constantly: the early modern philosophers were simultaneously preoccupied with significant metaphysical questions, and with concrete political change of their situation. Beginning with Machiavelli, atomism or physicalism is viewed as a metaphysics that legitimates a politics of mastery. If we do not understand the political motivations of early modern materialism, then we will miss many of the important political implications of Gendlin's work, or the rediscovery of the intricate or natural order.

This is where the evaluation of Descartes becomes crucial. Gendlin is right that something crucial happens with Descartes, that a new type of science is crystallized and disseminated. Gendlin is further correct that Descartes was aware of the intricate order as well as the imposed order. But why did Descartes champion the imposition of mathematical orders? Why did Descartes value control or domination or mastery so highly? And is it really just Gallileo that Descartes is acting in relation to or carrying forward?

I think that Descartes' more significant predecessors are Machiavelli and Bacon. Descartes is the inheritor of a philosophical propaganda campaign initiated by Machiavelli and transformed by Bacon. According to Strauss, Machiavelli's chief goal is to make philosophy political useful so as to disrupt the rule of the Catholic church that was so persistently involved in the affairs of his home of Florence. Machiavelli begins writing books that reach towards propaganda; that seek to influence, agitate, and provoke change, rather than simply inquire into the truth. According to Richard Kennington, Bacon makes modifications to Machiavelli's project. He introduces the notion of Christian charity, and he introduces the notion of the mastery of nature.

Descartes picks up where these two leave off. He advocates for a collective, progressive project of mastering nature, and for the creation of an 'infinity of devices' that could help a class of philosophers win the favor of the common people. Descartes praises 'generosity' in this context of the mastery of nature for the improvement of the human situation. These are admirable goals. But clearly they had unintended consequences. Several hundred years later, we have many many sophisticated weapons, and we no longer believe that there is such a thing as a natural order, and therefore no natural restraints on what we do. All is possible for the human being.

All three of these figures are interested in atomism or materialism because it is conducive to the project of mastering nature. All three, moreover, were in the business of rejecting central presuppositions of ancient philosophy. Chiefly, all three rejected the notion of teleology; or the idea that nature is a nature of natural ends: goodness has a place in the world. Teleology, as a theoretical account of the world, placed goodness front and center, and demanded that the world be evaluated in moral and ethical terms. Caroline Merchant tracks the political tension between mechanism and teleology beautifully in The Death of Nature.

Descartes' texts, then, are not just philosophical documents that led to the assumption that there is only imposed order. Descartes' texts are more like Marx's Communist Manifesto than most would think: these are propaganda pamphlets, invitations to join in a revolutionary project. Indeed, as Arthur Melzer reports, D'lambert praised Descartes as " 'a leader of the conspirators'... who had the courage to be the first to 'rise against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a resounding revolution, laid the foundations of a more just and happier government, which he himself was not able to see established'." (Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, 252). This view of Descartes seems out of style. It is the only way I can make sense of his texts.

The politicization of Descartes' writings also casts greater light on his ability to navigate the relationship between the intricate and imposed orders. Descartes was a skilled practitioner of what is known as esoteric writing. Esoteric writing is a complex phenomena that points to the relationship between philosophy and society. More specifically, esoteric writing is a response to the fact that intellectuals or heterodox thinkers have almost universally been persecuted. Socrates, Bruno, Gallileo, countless others, were murdered or coerced for doubting the views held sacred by their political community. Censorship, however, cannot simply stop the occurrence and dissemination of heterodox thoughts. Descartes, after all, says that the Church's authority is over his actions; his thoughts he regards as subject only to his own reason.

Descartes skill as an esoteric writer is that he manages to conform sufficiently to the political-theological situation, accommodating certain statements about god, promising to respect conventions. He adopts a rhetorical front in which he seems to accept certain words, allow certain premises. Let us take the Discourse on the Method as an example. I recently read this book quite carefully. On its surface, it appears to be a peculiar 'fable' or tale whereby Descartes lets people know about his personal, private, very non-revolutionary project that he has been undertaking. Don't worry, this is harmless stuff. Descartes is very respectful, and just wants a good solitary life.

(Esoteric writing also possesses a 'metaphysical' as well as a political dimension. The esoteric text self-consciously works with the relation between surface and depth, imposed order and intricate order, because the world itself contains surfaces and depths, logical orders and intricate orders. This also explains what Melzer calls the pedagogical element of esotericism: the obscure text is an image of nature. Metaphysical and pedagogical esotericism belonged more solidly to ancient philosophy. It is not until the Enlightenment that esotericism as philosophical-political-propaganda begins to be more widely and aggressively practiced. Descartes is employing some mixture of these forms of esotericism, but the political dimension predominates in a way that is not true of, say, Plato).

As the text progresses the political context of the work emerges. Sections 2 and 3 are book ended by references to the wars of religion that were dominating Europe at the time. Descartes himself tells of us his soldiering and traveling. The violence of the wars of the religion is the backdrop to the entirety of the Discourse. I think it is reasonable to think that Descartes did not mention the wars of religion by accident.

At the beginning of section 6 Descartes becomes more explicit about his concerns with the theological-political situation. He tells us that he had intended to publish a book, but that the persecution of Galileo has made him apprehensive. Surely, he thought to himself, nothing in this doctrine of geocentrism could be offensive to the church? I have a hard time believing him here. I also have a hard time believing that Descartes doesn't perceive the revolutionary implications of the project he is laying out in the Discourse. The core of the project, after all, is the mastery of nature through a technologized form of natural science. Tell me, how is it that a project of mastering nature is supposed to be a solitary, apolitical project anyway?

Further into section 6 Descartes entirely drops any pretense of his project being merely personal. He essential makes a call for other like-minded scientists to join with him, to conduct their own experiments, to share their experiments with him. Descartes, in short, is inviting other philosophers to join in a joint and progressive project of mastering nature. And it is medicine, health, moreover, that presents itself as the chief good that the mastery of nature can offer.

The Discourse, then (I have insufficently demonstrated), is a politically charged document in which Descartes is attempting to gather like-minded philosophers. He hopes that these other philosophers will gain in a long term progressive project of mastering nature with the hope of improving the conditions of human beings through the development of medicine. The wars of religion and the persecution of Galileo are the backdrop to this writing.

Studying Descartes in a political way, then, opens up a deeper dimension of his awareness of the relationship between the imposed and the natural orders. Descartes is advocating for the imposition of mathematical order at the exact moment that he is also navigating and conforming to the imposed theological-political order: Descartes skillfully conforms the demands of the Catholic church and the possibility of persecution. Yet, on a deeper level, he is able to communicate to careful readers precisely what he is doing. Implicitly, between the lines, Descartes is not simply engaged in a personal project: he is trying to agitate others to imitate him, trying to get others to join him in the project of mastering nature so as to bring about a new theological-political order.

The real intricacy of the Cartesian texts is clearest in this navigating of the exoteric level (imposed order) and the esoteric level (the intricate order). The possibility of political revolution, major change, lies in the esoteric or intricate order.

This reevaluation of Descartes does not invalidate Gendlin's reading, so much as add a different dimension to it. Because Descartes is not the only practitioner of esoteric writing. Esotericism was practiced by basically all thoughtful philosophers for several thousand years. The forgetting of the esoteric tradition happens when governments became more tolerant of or involved with philosophy. Persecution lessens, the need for esotericism goes away. We don't need to write this way, we don't need to read this way.

The disappearance of the esoteric tradition lines up pretty neatly with Gendlin's claim that the intricacy disappears with Kant and Hegel. It is after the French and American revolutions that the tradition of esoteric writing seems to wane. Suddenly the older texts start to look like everyone is locked in their time. Conformity is mistaken for historical-lock-in syndrome.

Fleshing out Gendlin's narrative of modernity not only explains the forgetting of the intricacy. It opens the door to a practice that can unite the public and the private, the imposed and intricate orders, in our being. Socratic being is esoteric being.

The Being of the Body is The Being of Language: An Exercise in Building Intricacy, Fashioning Concepts, Tracking Logos, Carring Forward..... Imitating Gendlin

The being of the body is the being of language.

My goal is to explain what this phrase means to see precisely in what sense it is true. Because there are senses in which it is true.

The phrase is likely not intelligible from the outset because I am using the words 'body', 'language', and 'being' in peculiar or idiosyncratic ways. I will explicate what I mean by these words. I will repeat the phrase, 'the being of the body is the being of language', as I proceed. I hope that as I explicate and repeat the central terms a reader, and myself as the writer, will begin to perceive the intricacy or complexity of the terms. In this way the writing will be a self-instancing of what Eugene Gendlin refers to as 'carrying forward' or the 'fashioning of concepts capable of displaying their intricacy'. I am currently hard at work on Gendlin, so this will help.

The being of the body is the being of language.

When I use the word 'body' I am likely to conjure a host of connotations, the most prominent perhaps being the idea of the 'physical' body that operates principally through mechanisms that we measure through physics, chemistry, physiology, and biology. The body, in short, is thought of as a type of machine. A machine, Gendlin argues, can be broadly defined as "a set of known patterns separated from the thing in which other factors could cross with them. Now we can notice that science renders everything as a machine!" ("The Responsive Order,"1997, in Saying What we Mean, 2018, 272). If the body is a machine, as science and medicine presuppose, then of course the being of the body is not the being of language.

The being of the body is the being of language, but not in the sense of the body as a machine. This would require an image of language in which it were also a collection of 'units' that could be interchangable with one another. It would require what Whitehead refers to as 'the fallacy of the perfect dictionary': it requires a misunderstanding of language in which it consists of 'logical atoms' (Re: Russel, Ayer, early Wittgenstein). The body is not a machine, it is not comprised of units. Language is not a machine, it is not comprised of units.

The body is an organism, not a machine. Language belongs to organisms, and itself resembles an organism.

The being of the body is the being of language in the sense that the body is an organism that makes its way in the world via its aims, or its sense of pleasure, goodness, or value.

To think the body as an organism as opposed to a machine requires that many presuppositions be reconfigured. The body as an organism implies an account of language in which it is more than a collection of parts, but a part of a holistic organismic process. Language must somehow be a subordinate element in the total functioning of the organism. I quite like Peter Levine's definition of organism as "a complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relation and properties are largely determined by their functions in the whole. Therefore, the whole of the organism is greater than the sum of its individual parts." (Waking the Tiger, 67). The existence of organisms is a direct contradiction to the account of the universe whereby it is defined by the chaotic movement of its smallest parts. The organism is a problem for physicalism.

I think it more promising to rethink physicalism than to explain away the organism, although many think otherwise.

Organisms as genuine wholes driven by aims raise the question of the place of goodness or value in the universe. For if the existence of organisms is a challenge to the account of physicalism, atomism, the unit model, then the organism demands a fundamentally different picture of the cosmos. In particular, the organism challenges the Lucretian, atomistic view of the universe in which it is made of empty space and atoms. The smallest things are not the most important things. Mereological nihilism is not a defensible position (and I have never taken it to be). Genuine wholes exist.

The existence of organisms presents us with the problem of the radical discounting of life that has taken place during the modern period. If we examine the reasons for the radical decentering of life we find political motivation. Beginning with Machiavelli and passing through Bacon, Descartes, and much of the early modern period, the physical sciences, particularly atomism, are viewed as a politically useful tool. Robert Roecklein explicates this problem in provocative ways. Machiavelli knew that by borrowing terms from physics he could think of the 'people' as 'masses' to be manipulated. Bacon and Descartes furthered this project of mastering nature and applying physicalist models to the workings of politics. I am unsure if behaviorism, B.F. Skinner, and transhumanism would have pleased or horrified the early modern founders. Transhumanism, I have been claiming for a while, is the logical outcome of the early modern philosophers.

The being of the body is the being of language.

If the body is an organism, then the organism has some fundamental connection with language, and language has some fundamental connection with being. For if the body is not a machine and language not a series of units being deployed by that machine, then language must be something other than a series of 'signifiers' pointing to unknowable 'signified'.

The body as an organism must also have its own politics. For we see that the account of the body as machine leads to an account of language as machine leads to an account of politics as mastery, as techne.

The being of the body is the being of language.

The being of language is the being of the world.

The being of language is being.

The being of the organism is necessarily being through time. As an organism moves through time it necessarily 'moves through' or 'occupies' space. As an organism moves through time and space it leaves traces of its activity in the world. An organism can not move without effecting the environment around it.

These traces seem to possess an inherent intelligibility. I imagine that animals smell each other, notice each other's tracks and droppings. The movement of an organism implies the existence of other organisms that are 'related to' or 'accounted for' within the movement of the organism.

The existence of the organism implies the existence of other organisms. Just as the existence of hunger implies the existence of food, implies the existence of digestion, implies the existence of defecation, implies the existence of hunger.

The being of an organism implies the total environment that 'facilitates' or 'contains' the organism's being. The being of an organism implies other organisms that inhabit this environment. The being of the organism thus implies an intelligible world in which there are necessarily others who are both intelligible and intelligent.

The being of the body is the being of language.

The being of the world is the being of language.

The body is the language of the world.

Language is the body of the world.

The world is the speaking body.

The world is alive.

The being of the organism implies the existence of memory.

The existence of memory implies the existence of story.

The being of the world is the being of language.

To say that the being of the body is the being of language forces us to confront the intimate intertwining of ideas about ourselves, other animals, politics, and the cosmos. For the if the body is a machine it implies: the existence of empty space, the existence of atoms, a strictly formal account of language, and a politics of mastery. If the body is an organism it implies: the existence of a living universe; the primacy of wholes over parts; an account of language in which it is synonymous with being; and a politics of tragedy (which I will not explicate here).

The being of the body is the being of language.

Being is Language.

The body is being

The body speaks, incessantly.

The most appropriate name for the world is: The Tale.