The Safety and Violence of Formality

Today someone pointed out to me the important relationship between trauma and formality. They explained that they knew people who were so traumatized, fearful, and disconnected that they reverted to a sort of brutal formality: everything was rigid manners, rote routines and roles. They described a human being bereft of Life, subsisting on the paltry scraps of formality.

And yet formality is necessary for life. We are vertebrates. We are combinations of living flesh and stable structure. 

The soul is nomic and natural, and that is okay.

Because formality also supplies safety, reliability, predictability. What would I do without the formality of the working week the grocery store? 

 

And how much pain did it cause me for my most recent living situation to collapse, for my routines to be threatened?

How strange, this delicate dance with shape and form that we undertake. We needs the forms. The forms are real and good and often natural.

What is a human trellis?

From History to Eternity, or the Path to the Field

Parts of contemporary philosophy and psychology are both vexed by the meaning of 'postmodernism'. This afternoon I was on the phone and I glanced at my bookshelf: "Beyond Postmodernism: New dimensions in clinical theory and practice," edited by Roger Frie and Donna Orange (both of whom I admire). Much of my current reading concerns the legacy of postmodernism as it appears in philosophical and clinical thought.

The notion of postmodernism implies that modernity was a real and discernible period of 'history'. It implies that modernity has now passed, and we are now in 'postmodernity'. The unconscious axioms, we are told, have shifted; we live under a new episteme, a new set of 'absolute presuppositions'.

I fear historicist hermeneutics. I fear the idea that we are locked in culturally and historically. I fear the denial of a common human nature.

Esoteric hermeneutics is a hemerneutics now of history, but of eternity. The soul can live forever in its signs, so long as another soul can recognize the life behind those signs.

 

Humanity may not be on a path. We may be in a field. Although development makes this hard to understand entirely. 

 

The beings grow by Nature, but Nature does not grow? This would seem to be the case.

False Starts

 I recently moved into a new apartment. It is quite nice and I have been here for about a month exactly.

I had minor surgery that affected me far more intensely than I anticipated. It was a difficult experience. A coworker and I had spoken about it: "General anesthesia will kind of rock your world, man." He was right. It rocked my world.

I have begun and stopped several pieces of writing.

One is loosely on Eugene Gendlin and the problem of human growth. Human growth is difficult because growth and violence seem to be strangely and intensely knit in us. Growth and violence are generally intertwined. Here I understand growth as the actualizing or fulfilling of natural potentialities. By violence I mean the impeding, arresting, or somehow hindering the actualizing or fulfilling of natural potentialities.

 

Violence reaches its peak or limit in the killing or murdering of a being; thereby the greatest violence has been done and the being can no longer grow. 

 

It is not clear where growth reaches its peak.

 

To fulfill one potentiality is to deny the possibility of another potentiality. If a being has more than one good alternative, then one good alternative must be denied. The denial of that potentiality is, by my current definitions, an act of violence. 

 

Thus choice, and perhaps action, is a necessary combination of growth and violence. 

 

Human life, growthful or otherwise, can be of a particularly violent sort. The dilemma seems to arise out of the divide in our nature between rational and politics, science and society, or individual and communal goals. I take all of these dyads to be synonymous, but they are different and its not quite right.

We cannot fulfill our individual potentialities without fitting our activity into the activity of those around us. We must find 'roles' or 'jobs' to fill. It is perhaps impossible to escape 'society' all together. 

But the roles available in a community are finite, and are not constructed, generally, with the purposes of makes individuals happy, but with the collective project of that society.

In good socities the pursuit of the collective goal does produce roles and occupations that are good for the individuals as well.

But more often than not there seem to be a lot of bad jobs. 

This means that my growth is predicated upon a certain amount of systemic social violence. I read Zizek's Violence in 2011. I suspect I still am carrying something from it.

The other two pieces of writing are both on R.D. Laing and esoteric writing. I recently finished reading Laing's The Divided Self and was delighted. What a wonderful book. What a wonderful thinker. I really enjoy his writing for its humor, clarity, and frankness. He has a pithy way of putting dilemmas. I haven't spent much time with his poetry, but some. 

The more I think about it the more it makes sense to connect esoteric writing and the problem of 'mental illness'. Esoteric writing refers to a complex rhetorical and philosophical practice used in the construction of philosophical (or controversial) texts in politically persecutory environments. Writers will have to seemingly outwardly conform by producing an 'exoteric' or surface argument of a book. At a deeper level, however, they are making perhaps more subversive or philosophically rich arguments in an 'esoteric'. 

 

The problem of esotericismis the problem of managing the relation between surface and depth in the necessarily double life of a human. 

 

I am me and the part that I am playing. 

 

I am Riley-being-a-therapist. Me and the role both are and aren't being something different. I am the role. I do not exist without roles. Yet I have persisted in spite of roles, implying that I am something more than the roles. 

What is this pretense that is necessary to human life? Why do we have to show that we know what we are doing. Part of being competent is being able to put on the performance of competence. The difference between being and seeming is so difficult for us.

Sometimes we feel the gap between ourselves and our role so violently. I love and hate the joke about an employee at Wal-Mart or somewhere similar taking off their name tag and fighting a customer that was being insulting. "I don't care about this job enough to not..." In a moment like that the being has erupted through its part in the action of that moment. 

"Yeah we're gonna need to ad lib this, this can't go down this way." Because there always scripts to get us through a moment. But the script does not necessarily give life.

I learned from Laing and others that there is a phenomenon within the world of schizophrenia referred to by clinicians as 'double bookkeeping'. Someone struggling with psychosis may have a good idea of what the 'external' world expects of them (how to behave in a store, etc), and they also answer to a different world, an 'inner' world in which the signs and symbols of meaning don't follow the same rules. They answer to a more exacting order. Double bookkeeping is meant to describe the phenomenon of individuals experiencing psychosis keeping track of both of these layers: surface and depth; inner and outer.

Esoteric writing is double bookkeeping that is necessary for the philosophical life, in the fullest sense.

My lasagna is ready and I'm tired. Goodbye.

Something Something Death... Something Something Passage...

The death of a Place,

The passage of A Time. 

What is that?

Clock time is suffered.

Real time passes, the way

We pass from This Place.

I was almost struck by a car on 17th and Madison while returning home from work. The day was difficult. August 6th, 2020. I had cravings that I intended to indulge, or wounds that I intended to lick. All day I had listened to and told stories  that involved people suffering things I hope to never suffer. Something something hospitalization, something something Ativan, something something decompensation.

 

My arms were full as I waited at the intersection: a loaf of bread, a steak, a small piece of cultured goat cheese. I had been looking at my phone but was not looking at it as I began to cross the street. The crosswalk changed. I began to walk. I did not look both ways. Behind me a man with a stroller screamed indistinctly, 'not even words just ahhhh ahhhh ahhhhh.' I froze.

As I looked to my left I saw a black Tesla pass through the intersection, several feet in front of me. I thanked this man and the woman that was with him and wondered about the child in the stroller. I wondered about what life meant to him now that he was responsible for a life that was small and nascent and not yet a Life. I thanked them both a few times and they told me they were glad I was okay. "I need to pay attention," I said. "Well, you assume it is your turn when the light changes," the woman said kindly and matter-of-factly. A mail carrier crossed from the other side of the street, "I'm glad you are okay." I thanked him as well. 

I went about my evening. I cooked the food I purchased. It was a delicious meal and I enjoyed it more having been reminded of how quickly I could pass from this place in a way altogether different from how that Tesla passed through the place where I almost was. 

I am soon moving from the apartment I have been living in for more than two and a half years. I am sad for a variety of reasons but am eager  for a new place where I can be alone with myself. I remember people who told me that they struggled being alone, they didn't like it. They don't like to be alone.

I suppose I understand what that means.

But I so love being alone. And it is not a matter of course, to be alone. It is not a fact of our birth or being. It is something altogether different; an achievement, a relief, a gift... something something whatever Rilke said about Solitude becoming Vast.... something something 'walk inside of yourself for miles without meeting another soul...'

I meet many souls and I am fond of them. I think some of them are fond of me. 

 

I hope for more.

I wonder which soul almost ran me over in their Tesla on August 6th, 2020. I wonder if they understand, imagine they understand,

                                the way that we all pass from this place.

What would it mean to hasten the passage of a being from this place?

What will it be like, 

                                                    to pass from this place?

Something something 'being dead is not an experience one can have.'

Something something 'when we are, death is not; when death is, we are not.'

Something something the being of death is not the being of nothingness.

I wonder, what will happen, when I undertake my passage. 

 

I look forward to that learning, but I hope to delay it

                        until its due time.

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...