The beginning of part 3 of my current project

I am currently in the exploratory phase of a book length project. I have just over 125 pages of writing that is planned to be in three sections: language, politics, and reality (ontology, metaphysics, whatever). I have completed the sections on language and politics, in both cases drawing a contrast between the orderliness of concepts and the orderliness of experience. In the language section this takes the form of an exploration of therapy using the dyad of trellis talk and capture talk. In the politics section I explore the history modernity in  relation to the present state of psychological and psychiatric institutions, using the dyad of convivial and manipulative institutions. In this third section, which I've just begun and am posting here, I am applying a similar approach ("the two orders") to the problem of reality, science, and philosophy in general. I am trying to understand how reality can be such that we can experience language and institutions these ways. How is it possible that there is an animal that is so intimately interwoven with speech that its natural development is contingent upon how it speaks? How is it that this animal has learned to speak (and build and symbolize) in such a way that it 'captures' itself? How must we think about reality to make these things both intelligible and integral (as in maintaining their integrity, not reducing them to crude concepts). This writing is my beginning of my current attempt to work through these ontological questions.

 

3. Reality, The Two Orders, and the Shape of Science

 

I have used the word ‘real’ in different ways throughout my life. It seems like an indispensable word. I’ll have to start tracking how often clients use the word real, or how they use the word. My sense is that the question of “how I really feel” or “what’s really going on” is always at play. Most people have a sense that they could be misperceiving, making things up, or projecting. Sanity is somehow about being in touch with reality. An animal that is living a good life or is healthy is interacting with its environment in ways that evince their grasp of reality. Animals understand and have functional knowledge of their environments: that this can be eaten or that can be climbed, that this branch will support my weight, or this height will keep me safe. Humans and animals are inherently interactive with their environments and therefore must somehow encounter the reality of that environment, even if through different bodies. The fish’s experience of water, for example, must radically differ from the human experience of water. But I have a hard time believing that there is no overlap in our phenomenology (the feel of gliding through water, feeling a current push against you, some sense of temperature). There is something in the nature of the ocean that a fish and human both encounter but in different ways. We get different angles on the reality that is the sea. 

Yesterday, 10/27/22, I was reading Keir’s dissertation and it strikes me as relevant to this problem of reality. While discussing the problem of false opinion Keir gives the example of a fly being eaten by a venus fly trap. “When a fly lands on a venus fly trap and is snapped up by it, the venus fly trap has said false things to the fly—and the fly has believed them. The issue is perhaps this: we are at a distance from being. Being is neither fully present to us nor totally absent” (141). Keir goes on to name this as the problem of appearance (of course reality is generally contradistinct from appearance, illusion, fantasy, artifice, construction, or the like). “Appearance, for us, however, is never mere appearance. Mere appearance is a philosophical construct. Real appearance is always the appearance of something, even if we can’t say exactly of what. This ‘of’ is somehow the source of the problem. Because we are at a distance from being, we can never rest purely passive in our reception of it, but must always move out to meet it halfway” (141). As human beings we interact with reality (‘move out to meet it halfway’) in particularly complex ways (discussed above). Like plants we have a body that reconstitutes itself in relation to the environment. Like the other animals we have an experience of behavior space (and I agree with Gendlin when he says we interact with reality mainly with our hands and mouths). We are unique, however, in that we engage symbols as such, moving beyond animal gesturing towards the FLIP space where the intergestural context becomes a complex symbolic system, entrenched in buildings, institutions, and structures of all kinds. For us, therefore, the attempt to meetreality must navigate at least two layers of appearance. We must first confront the apparent reality of our political community, always distorted by doxa, and then somehow redeploy those same concepts in relation to the appearances of nature as we encounter it. Our movement from appearance to reality is double. First political, then natural.

Interaction is only possible in time. The pattern of action, response, action (implying-occurring, interaction) requires there to be something like time or process. It is clear that in the universe, at least for us, time only goes one way. There is only further change and development. There is no going back. I love The Midnight’s song WeMoveForward (their first song), “because we can’t go back.” And I love the lyrical refrain they offer on their new song “Heartbeat”: “We keep going 'cause we can't go back, no / We keep going 'cause we can't go back.” Things are not simply temporal but developmental, or Carl Rogers would say formative. Things seem to come together on their own, getting organized, adopting shapes and cycles. Indeed, I will be concerned with the literature on self-organizing systems or developmental systems theories or similar things I don’t know enough about. Living things are a particularly strange and unique form of self-organizing systems. We have this thing called experience, which is a unique form of developmental process that involves an ‘internal’ quality with aspects like learning, exploring, encountering, and so on. I suppose I’ll preliminarily rely on Nagel’s “What is it like?” definition of life or consciousness. It is a good enough starting place. It is in time that we use language and interact with reality. We interact with reality as living beings that have a ‘what it is like’ to be us. Thus any talk about reality is necessarily going to be talk about time or developmentality, and more specifically it will be talk both about and from the space of lived development (or growth).
 

I want to organize this section into two basic chunks. The second will be a general ontological or metaphysical statement about how I think about reality. Perhaps more importantly, I will be concerned with how to talk about how to talk about reality. Because the plain fact is that we can’t talk about reality in some simple sense (like drawing a map), as Keir notes. There is something about the way our languages work that talking about reality generates a gap of some kind. We can’t just ‘say how things are’. Talking is too obviously a part or aspect of reality that it could never stand sufficiently outside of reality to talk “about” “it” in some precise or specific way. Talking about reality is really more like talking with or from or out of reality. We have to speak as a part of the thing being discussed and not pretend to have some distance or objective space. I want to develop a way of speaking about reality that accounts for our being within reality, inseparable and emergent from its processes. Acknowledging our embeddedness, however, does not mean that we are incapable of developing meaningful images or accounts of reality in general. It just means that those images or accounts will be more self-consciously understood, we will not have naive ambitions of just saying how things are. Rather, we will follow Gendlin in developing/pursuing a concept that is capable of exhibiting and describing at the same time.
 

More specifically, I am interested in concepts that describe the processual nature of things while also participating in that process. The key to this is allowing concepts to be developmental in both how we read and write. As a reader, this means understanding that the meaning of words is not simply on the page, words don’t just “mean what they mean,” there is no perfect dictionary. To read a text (just like listening to a person) we have to track the way the words are used and what sorts of experiential responses the text generates in us. (What are you wanting these words to do?) Well written books are developmental and they must be read so that words and concepts can acquire complexity as the text develops. Similarly, as a writer, I want to use concepts developmentally, track and expand their meaning. Indeed, this is what I’ve tried to do throughout this text, asking readers to ‘roll up’ or ‘carry forward’ the meaning of one term into another. I have tried to exhibit complex mutations of concepts where esotericism can come to overlap with irony and both can be shown to overlap with love. And then to show how these concepts surrounding language can be folded into an analysis of institutions. Finally I am putting those same concepts to work in the domain of ontology or reality.
 

In writing, reading, or listening this way I am self-consciously engaging with the two orders: the order of language and the order of experience. Words only ever have meaning in relation to ongoing experiencing, which is implicitly intricate in ways that words can never convey. In the first section I showed that trellis talk concerns the relationship between the two orders; trellis talk leaves space for a person to be in process, and therefore invites their intricate becoming. The symbols are intended to stimulate this more intricate experiential process. In trellis talk the concern is not with the symbols in their logical relations or implying, but rather the symbols as they enable experiential development. It isn’t about the symbols, in a certain sense. In my writing on politics I showed that modern institutions are particularly adept at capturing people, squashing their capacity for intricate relating or selfhood. Now I want to show how this capacity for intricate experience has implications for science, philosophy, and intellectual or personal inquiry of any kind. This is not just a problem of language or politics, it is a problem of reality. How is it that there are multiple forms of order that are distinct but also emergent and interactive? More specifically, emphasizing the subservience of language to the intricate order will highlight the significance of response in any form of inquiry (like eliciting in therapy or conviviality in institutions). Approached with the idea of language as capable of generating responses (from the intricate order) philosophy would need to become more dialectical, science would need to change its attitude towards experimentation (like Kimmerer says), and persons in general would be capable of deep listening and know how to further conversations in growthful ways.
 

Becoming aware of the two orders, self-consciously thinking, writing, and living in relation to them could be described as becoming more first-personal. To be first-personal is to recognize the primacy of experience not just in theory but in practice; it is to feel oneself living out of one’s body, with all its capacity for sensing into the complexities of our situations. I told a client recently that I think of therapy as a process of becoming first-personal. As we move deeper into our bodies there is more familiarity with native desire, easier for us to make decisions about difficult things, a greater trust in ourselves. This being-first-personal is significant also in philosophizing and science. Gendlin argues in “What First and Third Person Processes Really Are” that scientists need to begin to talk explicitly about how they are working with their ‘implicit understanding’ or felt sense of things. Gendlin is right to point out that we generally only hear about how a concept is better, not where it comes from. Inviting scientists or philosophers to be more-first personal (to engage in and discuss direct reference to experiencing in their process of concept formation) may be difficult because these are professions that operate in institutional spaces. Institutional spaces, as observed, are generally highly third-personal spaces: they maximize efficiency and reduce people to roles by zooming out and generalizing. They take a third-person point of view and in doing so train people in the self-conditioning of their first-person experience, subjecting it to an external gaze.
 

Thus these are questions I am asking and themes I want to track. Given what has been said about language and our political institutions, what does it mean to speak meaningfully about reality? Speaking about reality means speaking about time, development, or process. How does language, which is so often structure bound, lend itself to the task of discussing or describing processes? How does our analysis of trellis talk apply not only to therapeutic contexts, but also to philosophical and scientific processes? How does the goal of discussing reality interact with the distinction between first- and third-person science?  My hunch, or basic hypothesis, is that the biggest difficulty to surmount is that we are attempting to describe a whole of which we are a part with partial access to this whole (to paraphrase Strauss and invoke Nagel). The world changes and we change with it, and therefore it can never be described finally (I think of the Judge in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, burning natural things after documenting them so he has perfect knowledge of them. They can not change, for then he would no longer know them. Thus he must destroy them to preserve the perfection of his knowledge). Third-person science is a sort of theory that destroys us or leaves us out altogether. Deacon’s Incomplete Nature will be my example of this. It pretends to speak from a perspective in which seemingly no observer exists and then tries to reconstruct the observer from this nowhere perspective. The gap between the descriptions and reality is palpable. I was deeply disappointed when I reached the end of Deacon’s book and it took me some time to understand exactly why: he never makes the turn to first-person perspective as such,  only  ever talking about it from a third-person perspective. First-person science, by contrast, can significantly close this gap between the description of the world and experience. Gendlin’s A Process Model will be my example. I believe Gendlin’s theory meets Nagel’s requirement of being able to ‘turn on itself’ and explain the existence of the theory and the theorizer. Gendlin gives a description of natural, emergent processes that ultimately explain the capacity for symbol making and ultimately theorizing. When you arrive at the end of the text you realize that the text itself is an example of what it is describing, the theory is capable of exhibiting and accounting for its own existence. The text itself is responsive and developmental, displaying the dialectic of symbol and experiencing. Gendlin invites you into his own stream of experiencing that allowed him to construct his model. Ultimately the process model will be the larger model, capable of nesting and moderating the unit model. The ultimate form of science that Gendlin advocates for is a multi-directional dialectic between the unit model, the explication model, and ongoing direct reference to the process of experiencing from which both models emerged. But we must learn this way of using concepts and this way of thinking of ourselves in a deeply first-personal way. The experience has genuinely changed me.
 

In doing this I am trying to suss out the nature of scientific and philosophical inquiry in general. This also necessarily means understanding the nature of language. Such big, general questions, however, always need particular subject matters as fodder and evidence. Therefore in the first section I will be pursuing an account of scientific psychology as a way of clarifying science, philosophy, and language in general.
 

3.1 The Meaning of General Psychology: Psyche, Development, Emergence

Pursuing the question, “What is psychology?” is important to me for both practical and theoretical purposes. Practically my concerns are varied but pertain to both my personal and professional life. I’m a psychotherapist and I’m deeply engaged with what psychology in America is right now. I also am someone who has benefitted very deeply from good psychotherapy and am invested in continuing to heal and grow as a person. Reading, writing, and understanding psychology is important for all of this. And then theoretically I am also interested for both practical and then more strictly theoretical reasons. I think theory is practical. I am very persuaded by a strong version of the word ‘phenomenology’ in which it points to the fact that, as humans, we can’t “see” things with depth and clarity unless we are able to conceptualize them or articulate them in some way. Theory is essential in outlining complex features of reality that can then be seen without the concept. Theoretical concepts, when repeatedly applied to actual observation, will begin to function implicitly in our quiet looking and listening. I also just think theorizing is fun and have a strictly theoretical interest in these theoretical questions! So there is the practical side of theory and the theoretical side of theory.
 

Psychology is poorly theorized. The field is a hodge podge of methodologies, definitions, orientations, purposes, and priorities (and funding sources). I am not aware of many American authors pursuing accounts of “general psychology” that try to give some unity to the field as a whole. The situation feels more like what Cabanas & Illouz describe in Manufacturing Happy Citizens, to paraphrase, ‘the field has to reinvent itself every 10-20 years to continually try and reestablish its relevance and therefore funding.’ The prestige of psychology, in my opinion, is not very well deserved, as much of the field consists of empty verbal platitudes paraded as knowledge. This tone and sort of wanton claim won’t make the book version, ha. I know there are a lot of psychologists I’m unaware of who have probably tried things like this.
 

A recent account of general psychology that I admire is Niels Engelsted’s Catching up With Aristotle: A Journey in the Quest for General Psychology. Engelsted views the field somewhat as I described above, as a disparate and largely incompatible smattering of methodologies and theories. Engelsted claims that psychology fundamentally ask about the meaning of the word psyche, indeed the central term of the discipline. Engelsted claims we should follow Aristotle and Alexi Leontiev in claiming that the problem of psyche (or soul, psuche, for Aristotle) essentially concerns the difference between the living and non-living. For Aristotle this would be things that have their principle of motion inside of them, as opposed to outside of them. If we have a stone in our hand and we throw it at a tree it will simply hit the tree. If we have a healthy bird in our hand, however, and we toss it toward a tree it will likely not hit the tree, instead it will fly in whatever direction it feels. The bird, unlike the stone, has some source of motion within itself. Soul or psyche is a placeholder for whatever this thing is that allows the bird to move (or the plant to grow or us to live as we do). For Leontiev the problem of psyche would be answered similarly in terms of the origins of sensation. Leontiev was heavily interested in the meaning  of the sensate body. I think of plants as having senate bodies, that they have some sort of simple interactive life with reality (I recall Gendlin saying “plants are interacting with reality all the time”). Engelsted thus claims that psychology must essentially be a science of the developing complexity of sensate bodies. He proposes a four part scheme beginning with sentience (largely in the present) and moving through intentionality (a sense of the future), mind (a view of the past), and human consciousness (capable of ‘the outside view’).

Thoughts on Thinking Clearly and Reality

 I am currently working on what feels like my first book length project. It is an inquiry into trauma and the body that revolves around the categories of language, politics, and metaphysics/ontology/reality. I have identified a set of patterns that hold across all three of these domains, and all three domains have implications for how we understand trauma and the body. 

I am designing the project so that the major concepts are mutually implying or entailed in one another. This design follows from certain convictions I have about what it means to think clearly.

Gendlin says in A Process Model that  “To think clearly, one needs concepts that share an internal structure, that develop together, so to speak. What each is, and what the others are, constitute a single structure so that one can grasp what each does in relation to the others” (p. 114). This means that in order to think clearly about trauma, the body, language, politics, and reality, we need a set of concepts that is applicable (in different ways) across these various domains. This set of concepts, moreover, cannot be laid out in a linear fashion, but must be used to an eye with the overall structure, texture, or mesh that they constitute. The ultimate life of concepts is in the body. The body does not deal in units but rather an experiential mesh that has many pre-separated strands. Thus the real life of thinking is in this embodied, felt mesh. I am building an embodied mesh of concepts that can help me think clearly about this set of problems. 

 

Thomas Nagel makes a similar point about thinking clearly in Mind & Cosmos. Nagel's argument foregrounds the peculiar status of the observer and the necessity of including the observer in our explanations of the world. Many 'theories of everything' developed in physics, for example, stop short of the human observer, the one who is articulating the theory. In this way these theories are incomplete: they can perhaps account for the world, but they cannot account for the existence of a being that is theorizing about the world. 

 

The crucial issue is with third-person perspective taking, or with attempts to study ourselves "from the outside." Physicalism/materialism and theism, Nagel claims, are both forms of external explanation: both assume a view from outside human experience that is then supposed to explain our experience. This means that both of them seek transcendence: not just understanding of our experience, but how our experience belongs to the larger world. This ambition, Nagel claims, "appears to be irresistible—as if we cannot legitimately proceed in life just from the point of view that we naturally occupy in the world, but must encompass ourselves in a larger world view. And to succeed, that larger world view must encompass itself" (23). I agree that this tempatation seems unavoidable. 

 

I cannot avoid the temptation or desire to think clearly. It feels commanding to me. I regard the desire for the truth, however problematic a concept, to be the only possible intellectual guide. It seems to me as though we are able to think about the world, and that our thinking can be more or less orderly, more or less true. Thus we must account for the nature of the world in such a way that makes our existence as thinking beings possible. 

 

This explanation of the world that grounds our own experience will never be absolute. I'm sympathetic to Nagel's claims that radical skepticism is likely irrefutable. This doesn't strike me as a huge problem. But it does seem necessary to try and explain something about our presence as thinking beings. Thus Nagel is moderate and wise when he says that "The hope is not to discover a foundation that makes our knowledge unassailably secure but to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not raadically self-undermining [as certain skeptical Darwinian or materialist arguments are], and that does not require us to deny the obvious [again, as something like eliminative materialism does]. The aim would be to offer a plausible picture of how we fit into the world" (25).

 

I regard the living body as a crucial grounding place for thoughts about reality, and thus as indispensible in our attempts to think about reality. Whatever else we can say, you are all up in that body, living it every day. If you are reading this, you are/have a body. Unless we want to go full blown insane skepticism, we need to admit that the body seems to be continuous with the rest of reality. It is made of the stuff that everything else seems to be made of, and it is in constant intimate interaction with the world, taking in air and water, excreting liquids and solids that return to the world. 

 

In my own approach to this problem I am trying to aggressively draw out the ontological threads of Gendlin's work on the body. I sense that he downplayed some of the ontological radicality because he doesn't want to use a term like ontology or metaphysics. But the more I read him he is clearly talking about reality or what the world is. At the end of "What First & Third Person Processes Really Are," for example, he says "Everything in nature is an implicit intricacy." Or in A Process Model he says "Experience, nature, or reality is much richer than that old view wanted" (245). 

 

The old view that Gendlin is talking about is the unit model, or the assumption that reality is made of little units or atoms that get rearranged. Trying to talk about experience, nature, or reality as if it is made of little units gets very confusing. We get all kinds of distorted ideas about how things could be, it becomes hard to explain things like language or science. If it is all just the little dead atoms, how could all this magical living stuff happen? 

 

The problem of thinking clearly about experience or reality is the problem of thinking clearly about life.

 

I haven't even been able to name the problem of language and how it fits into all this. But the problem of life of course becomes the problem of language, as there seems to be something symbolic or semiotic about life itself, in all forms.

 

But the relationship between language and nature is essential, decisive. There is temptation to say that language is the only order, as its capacity for creating is so profound, its ability to distort our view of things so certain. Indeed, a central pillar of Gendlin's philosophy is that the order of language is emergent from the order of nature. Language is both a development and a product of a larger order.  "In Western science," he writes in 'Words Can Say How They Work,' "everything is passive, organized by externally imposed relations [i.e. by our conceptual structures]. But if we want to study the actual observers, we cannot attribute the interrelating to still another observer. Somewhere there is a self-organizing process. Let us say that a living body is a self-organizing process" (105 in Saying What We Mean).

 

The self-organizing processes of nature generate a being capable of using language. That language generates its own order, one that Gendlin says can capture us and that Plato depicts as a cave. How do we engage the order of our language in such a way that we can reasonably speak about the self-organizing processes that seemed to generate our language? 

 

That's enough for now. I can't quite think clearly about all this right now.  

Talons', Illich/Sanders, Story, Self

I like some of the lyrics to this song by Talons' 'Moments'. 

 

"I made up all these moments that seem so profound
Little things I try to explain but it's impossible for anyone else to understand that this is why I am the way I am
But memory is fictional and I'm constantly rewriting it
to make sense of who I am and why
And the more I lose touch with everyone from my past, the more alone I am and the less chance there is that any of it was real
But what does it matter?
This is who I am now.
Nothing else."

 

I have been reminded of the complexity of the question of the self in recently reading Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders book ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. The book is a series of essays exploring the transition from oral to written culture. The first two essays deal with ancient literature: Homer, Plato, and the transition from poetic speech to poetic writing, with special emphasis on the meaning of history and memory.

The later chapters concern the role of writing and the alphabet in the transition from the middle ages to modernity. Many ways that we understand ourselves, they claim, depend on the existence of the alphabet and the written text. We, for example, think of memory and language through the image of the written text. 

Their chapter on 'The Self' concerns itself with the advent of the autobiography. They point to Henry Adams' autobiography, published after the author's death in 1918. They claim that it represents "a truly extraordinary development: The literary creation of the self has assumed enough life of its own to instruct and educate its creator." In writing an autobiography one regards oneself from the outside and seeks a type of continuity that is missing, for example, from Beowulf (they claim, I have not read it). Beowulf, they observe, possesses a variety of factual errors and narrative incoherence. That Beowulf is said to do contradictory things by different people is of no concern to the author, it appears. 

What is this coherence we seek in ourselves through story telling? Talons' seems to have some awareness of this. "Memory is fictional and I'm constantly rewriting it."

Loose threads. Messy events that cannot be told in story. 

The problem, in a sense, is the purpose of speech and its relationship to writing.

My work as a therapist makes it clear to me that some of the most powerful ways of speaking are not about coherent, linear, or comprehensive narratives. Therapeutic movement comes about, rather, through resonant images, through quasi-poetic phrases that move us in a physically palpable sense.

Speech is for moving the body forward in its process of understanding. Sometimes coherent or linear narratives can do this for us, but more often the body is moved by other kinds of speech, images, or sounds. 

I would rather a phrase or word or image make me cry than tell a coherent story.

Somehow autobiography can do this, I imagine. But not because it offers a coherent narrative.

There are domains of life in which resonant speech is more important than factual speech. 

It seems to be a real treat when speech can be both.

My sense is that the 'self' in a deep sense is what resonates or responds to certain ways of speaking. The self cannot simply be the external, factual narration. 

 

The self responds, but cannot show itself.

Active and Passive Senses

 I have noticed at different times that we speak differently of our senses if we are using them actively or passively (sorta).

If we are trying actively to hear we say, I am listening. 

Sight: I'm looking.

Touch: I am feeling. (Although this feels different from looking and listening somehow).

The case with smell and taste is more difficult. I haven't been able to find any words that connote an active sense of 'trying to smell or taste with greater clarity'.

Interestingly, we use touch, sight, and hearing as metaphors for understanding. Even more interestingly, when we feel that we have understood someone we use the passive version of that sense. When we understand we don't say "I am listening/looking." We say "I hear you. I see you. I feel you." 

Hear, not listening. See, not look. Feel, not feeling. (Again, feel seems different here).

In every case, we are talking about certain senses, but seemingly primarily metaphorically. When I understand a client I may say "Oh, I see," or "I really hear you when you say..." 

These are mostly scattered reflections, as I have been enjoying blogging and want to do more of it. But I also in some ways take all this as evidence of the depth of Gendlin's account of the body, and imagine that my friend Keir would render all this in terms of the soul (in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense). There would be something to say about 'kination', or that imagination originates in our bodily sense of understanding. Seeing, hearing, feeling; all of these are ways of expressing understanding.

Understanding is what the body does, not the senses.

Darkness 2

 I have been repeatedly listening to a song by Talons', Darkness 2. (I love Talons' and have been listening to his stuff for the last 10+ years).

Musically, I love the development and flow of the whole song.

Lyrically, I find it devastating. 

The lyrics:

"I'm somewhere out in the darkness now
I don't know how long I've been holding the power button down
And when the world starts up again,
I don't know how I even wanna live
But I can't go back
I see it all turn back
At Target it's like a dream, everyone unmasked
Desperately acting like nothing ever happened
Almost overacting, or am I overreacting?

Still can't sleep
Don't wanna double down on my old dreams
Nothing's changed, not even me, really.

And past the darkness there's just emptiness
Despite all my rage, I am still
More than anything I see the absurdity in everything

And all we try to own
Ups and downs, ups and downs
There's not enough time between storms now to try to calm down.
And where is hope now? (x8)"

I remember the first time I heard and understood the lyrics, I was devastated. The final repeating of the line, 'Where is hope now?' made me cry so hard. I actually thought he said "where is home now?" which has particular resonances for me.,

The song is off of his 2022 release, Pandemic Divide. 

It is interesting that I, in this exact moment, discovered that he says hope rather than home. I was just talking to someone about Epimetheus and hope. I was telling them about the final chapter of Illich's Deschooling Society. 

I absolutely love this song.

When Things are Out of Hand What Good is it to See?

Writing in the late 1930s R.G. Collingwood thought it appropriate to describe World War I and the Treaty of Versailles as a situation that "got out of hand": 

 

"Whether it was deliberately plotted by a ring of German war-lords, as some believed, or by a ring of English trade-lords, as others believed, nobody has ever supposed that any except the most tiniest fraction of the combatants wanted it. It happened because a situation got out of hand. As it went on, the situation got more and more out of hand. When the peace treaty was signed, it was more out of hand than ever. Fighting ended because one side was fought to a standstill, not because the situation was under control again" (An Autobiography, 90).

When I look at my life and I look at the world I see a lot of things that feel out of hand.  I am currently living through several personal situations that I feel I must simply live through. There is nothing for me to do, at least not in any simple or straightforward sense. There are no switches to flip, bridges to build, messages to send, or phone calls to make.

I am in the midst of things that will take time. 

Curiously, they are decidedly human situations; relationships of various kinds that I am navigating.

Indeed, it was the difference between "physical" and human situations that Collingwood ultimately thought the War highlighted: "The contrast between the success of modern European minds in controlling almost any situation in which the elements are physical bodies and the forces physical forces, and their inability to control situations in which the elements are human beings and the forces mental forces, left an indelible mark on the memory of every one who was concerned in it" (90).

Collingwood's answer to this problem was to encourage the study of history as a type of training in human affairs. He spoke of a "science of human affairs" whereby we could learn to handle human situations as skillfully as we had learned to manipulate the physical world.

To be capable of handling human situations could be called being 'tactful'. To be tactful, as I was just discussing with a friend this morning, means to be in touch, to be sensitive, close, intimate. To be 'tactful', however, implies some type of contact, as in 'tactile'. To be tactful is to 'handle' something in a certain way.

I am struck by the relationship between things being 'out of hand' and being 'tactful'. For something to be out of hand is for it to be out of control, for it to take a course in which we cannot or do not know how to intervene, guide, or control. 

This emphasis on 'hands' and 'tact' is interesting because Collingwood's major way of describing the science of human affairs emphasizes vision or seeing. He claims that historical study offers a type of optic training, not unlike the way a trained tracker or hunter can perceive a wealth of detail in a patch of woods that would appear indistinct to me. Indeed, walking with my friend John in the woods yesterday I was struck by his ability to point things out to me that I never would have noticed: little types of bushes, notches in trees left over from logging, rock formations created by particular processes. 

This is the deep meaning of the word phenomenology that Gendlin explicates so well in his essay on Heidegger: when we speak about or name things in a certain way we 'lift out' features of reality that can then be seen or perceived on their own. I will forever be sensitive to the many meaningful noises of a cafe, and I began to look at art differently after I started painting. 

Psychotherapy, my profession and a practice I've participated in for many years, is largely an exercise in this sort of phenomenology. Therapy is not about helping people decide what to do, but helping them learn to see. Chiefly, we are learning to see things that are invisible: patterns and dynamics that have a different existence from physical objects.

I believe Collingwood was fundamentally talking about this 'phenomenological' quality of historical study.

When we see things differently we handle things differently. But seeing and handling are different realities. Stanley Rosen helped me appreciate that the hand and the eye are fundamentally competing metaphors for knowledge or understanding. We say "I see what you mean" or "I don't grasp that sentence." 

Things in my own life feel deeply out of hand. I feel less in control than ever of my ultimate path, less clear than ever where it is all going, and less sure about where my many relationships will ultimately go. But I'm not terribly afraid. I'm certainly somewhat afraid. But not terribly. 

I feel that I see fairly clearly what is happening to me and around me, at least in my personal life and relationships. And I am confident that the clarity of my vision will ultimately serve me in my decision making. I don't need to know what is going to happen, I don't need to plan every detail. I can improvise based on what I perceive.

The key is to feel safe enough to continue to see clearly.

I am less confident and more afraid of what is happening in the larger world. I continue to work in Collingwood's wake, picking up his project, working on seeing clearly the situation we find ourselves in. I have currently been reading and writing some on Ivan Illich, and today picked up my copy of Limits to Medicine from Elliot Bay Books. Illich saw incredibly clearly things that I badly want to understand.

Before writing this blog post I got out of the shower and was reflecting on the many difficult situations I find myself in. I imagined myself speaking to someone and saying "it isn't important to me what happens." I was moved by the notion. Because what I feel when I say something like that is a great clarity about how I want things to happen.

I want to continue to show up for myself and for those that I am able to. I want to continue to work on seeing clearly. Part of me feels this is naive, as there is an urgency in me, we/I must do something. I, for example, recoil from the final line of John Grays Straw Dogs: "Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?" As my brief reflections on phenomenology should make clear, to see is to think. There is no separating of these things for us. And to think is never to think in some simple sense, but always to think more or less clearly. The problem is thus with seeing clearly.

While I feel it necessary to poke at John Gray, I wholly endorse Tokyo Police Club's lyric:

"But I was a lover, and I could see it clear."

Things feel out of hand, and I feel confident that the most important thing I can do is to continue to work on my seeing.

Structure and Process, Medicine and Trauma: A Note

 I am here to document a thought that I will develop further later. 

Intelligibility broadly, thinking in general, has something to do with the relationship between structure and process. A historian, for example, has access to certain 'structures': written documents, archeologically excavated buildings and objects, any sort of pattern or stable object. From these structures historians seek to derive and describe process. The Declaration of Independence is not significant in its own right, but is significant in that it belongs to a process whereby people tried to create certain forms of government. 

Medicine, similarly, tries to explain processes with reference to structures. We notice that a person's living is painful, that their body struggles or hurts in certain ways. These are fundamentally processes, ongoing activities whereby people live. We try to explain these in terms of structures: this pathogen has entered your body, this flaw exists in your neurology or genetic code. These structures (pathogens, flaws) are then employed to explain the quality of an ongoing process. 

Most epistemoligies are overly concerned with structures. As Gendlin says in a provocatively titled essay, however, 'Process generates structure, Structures alone don't generate process'. How do we think in a way that foregrounds process? 

This problem is especially difficult because our normal way of using language is structure-bound. I am employing strings of letters into words, sentences, and paragraphs. These are structures. But my use of these structures is in process. I was thinking about these ideas in conversation with someone this morning. I am doing this writing in the midst of the larger process of my day. I am deferring eating and showering because I wanted to document these thoughts.

It seems to me that trauma in the broadest sense is essentially about process: it concerns our ongoing activity. We can certainly say that there are 'structures' associated with trauma: neurological patterns indicative of chronic threat; epigentic change in genetic expression; patterns of speech and activity. But the fundamental reality of trauma is not in the structures, it is in the process of the living body. Those structures are ancillary to those processes.

Gendlin's work shows that structural thinking (language) can be employed within a larger frame of process (experiencing). I would like to propose that medicine and trauma stand in analogous relation to one another. Adopting a process/trauma frame does not mean that we don't value or look to medical intervention. It means that medicine must be situated within a larger trauma framework, just as language/structure must be situated within a larger framework of experiencing/trauma.

These are fancy, high level, abstract things to say. My sense is that it is a basically correct statement or formulation.

But I do not yet know what these structures mean. My process must go further, still.