Note on Husserl

Husserl shows why all fields have a conundrum about foundations and indiscernibles at the origin. 

It is because intellectual constructions first emerge naively in the already-made world preceding the    act of reflection.  The already-made is also the cultural root out of which all examination grows -- ultimately the most basic indefinables are performances rather than ideas -- the "basis from which."

Radical subjectivity tries to get behind this untutored positing -- radical self-investigation is universal self-investigation -- so we try define more narrowly world, time, space, psyche, organism, culture -- perhaps to rid ourselves of these beginnings and replace them with scientific precepts.  But to get to this intrinsically first being, we have to face the deep problems of what it means for something to be an accident -- we have to face fate and death and the meaning of human life -- we have to inquire whether it makes sense to distinguish a "genuine" human life from human life just by itself -- in brief we have to confront all the traditional "ethic-religious" problems -- which is why a truly phenomenological investigation must be an all-embracing self-investigation (Cartesian Meditations, § 64).

The big problems are inside, in the concepts we use -- the handhold system, upon which we build our sciences -- the truly Cartesian reflection will take this final jump -- this is a jump into the world we live in and in which we face the problem of orienting ourselves in a positive sense of life-meaning -- a sense of our own responsibility -- thus to lose the world by suspending our judgments about it, and to regain it by self-examination.  Thus at the end of his long series of experiments in the Cartesian spirit, Husserl comes back to his initial idea -- Turn back into yourself: truth dwells in the inner man -- know thyself!

usserl shows why t

mind maps

My themes in recent years have been the complexity of the ‘I’ and ideas about psychological integration.  I have tried to understand something about the mind’s construction of the world, and about what the individual can do to take power and determine the meaning of things on one’s own-- to see what there is, and what to do.

The big outlines of my studies have to do with “mind” and also with “society”-- the mind as society, and society as a kind of mind -- looking through different categories across boundaries of self/other and home/alien and unconscious/voluntary -- in all cases trying to make some maps of these territories, which I call mind-maps.

There is a great deal of work being done in this arena in current thinking -- the Canadian thinker Paul Churchland for example studies the impact of “social-level institutions that steer second-level learning” -- this gets him to the idea of “situated cognition,” an idea that connects the origins of language in human prehistory, and ideas about neurological evolution, to large systems of “nested regulatory mechanisms” such as language, oral tradition, written records, legal systems, schools, libraries, universities and research institutions -- this “epicerebral process” represents a constraint on action and thus a new formula by which to propose new initiatives.  Churchland sees that the underlying picture this view develops is Platonic: the physical brain captures a landscape of abstract universals -- form precedes experience -- reality as something humans ‘experience’ is constructed in social space, which itself develops over time from prehistory to today, fashioning new tools and groups and growing into something new by a social dynamic.

In my most recent work “Criticism and Healing,” I look at what we can learn from studying historic ideas of mental illness and different conceptions of what it means to “put oneself back together” after having fallen apart.  Here are a few excerpts:

“For the last several months my research has focused on the relation between criticism and healing. More specifically, I've been looking at critical partitioning in relationship to therapeutic strategies.  Put differently: I have been looking at various kinds of mind maps and various opportunities for self-regulation that they suggest.  The key problem of psychological integration varies with, must adapt to, and is empowered by the elements we identify as out of sync and needing integration.  Thus we can learn something from looking into this distinction and its development through history.”

“The “mind” is what the brain has developed in contact with the world, and in social life, in a complex and nuanced interaction with itself, as a strategy for survival or as a way of equipping itself to survive.  It does not seem possible that the region of the brain that is most involved with speech would not be deeply integrated with structures involved with social behavior as well as memory and imagination, in wildly different degrees and circumstances.  The idea of response or of the whole being reacting to its environment and exploiting resources at hand to try to survive and flourish -- which we can see in much simpler cases -- is what we are trying to say with the word “mind.”  The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is doing so much, and is interacting so powerfully with other brains, in so complex a form, that we have so much to look at when we start thinking about consciousness.  My idea here is simply that the basic functions -- such as seeking, fear, rage, surprise and play -- in interactions with each other and in society, constitute what we call mind.”

Greek maps

“Aristotle is an important source for the idea that creativity is bound up with passionate, violent emotions that break through social conventions; that forces deep in the soul shove themselves forward and upend morals; that we can measure thought by emotion and get some practice doing it, sometimes checking and sometimes encouraging desire, which builds up in us as habits -- what Aristotle calls ‘strengths of character’ or ‘virtues.’ 

“Nietzsche takes a critical step beyond Aristotle in further reasoning on the question, arguing that we harness the creative process by laying hold of the impersonations one has already undergone and enacted in countless episodes of social life; he argues that taking on roles in social life offers a precedent for explicitly creating a persona for oneself and acting it out; so that by conscious intention one may transform oneself into one’s own explicit creation. He emphasizes that creative work emerges out of a place where good and evil are still indistinct, but not because self-creation is amoral; instead, because art tries to wrestle raw, rude drive energies into an explicitly ‘created’ form.

Medieval maps

“In the medieval Morality play, we see Youth traveling on the Road of Life, set upon by Temptation and encouraged by Wise Counsel.  Our protagonist strays from proper guides such as Simple Virtue or Godly Life, and begins to spend his time with Misrule, Ignorance or All-for-the-money.  Things go downhill as Ignorance introduces Youth to Pride and Pride introduces him to Lechery and Lechery at last brings him to Iniquity, typically through the door of a tavern.   Then Charity, reminding the audience of the mystery of divine Grace, frees Youth from the influence of Ignorance and restores him to the company of Humility.   Thus we glimpse the profound change in the underlying psychology in society in making the jump from the heroic ideal of classical times -- a world of self-power -- to a new world of faith in which the agent cannot extricate himself from the troubles of life on his own initiative, but only by the grace of God …”

Biological maps

“The fundamental concept of mental health that seems to emerge in these researches is complex; it is about exposure to reality; it is social in nature -- it is a kind of growth via relation; it involves replacing automatic responses with mindful responses (via social resources we have a chance to isolate what is going on unconsciously within us -- by means of social learning we get some handholds to bring more of the automatism under conscious control -- ultimately to a new kind of unforced but still thoughtful response).  In this sense Freud’s maxim that where Id was, there Ego shall be is exactly right. 

A frequent metaphor from the new biological synthesis is imagining oneself as a very small rider on top of an enormous elephant.  This goes to the sense that we are much more elephant than we are rider.  At the same time absolutely everything depends on the rider learning something about the elephant, and gradually getting some control over the elephant.  This is very difficult and should make us patient with people who have some trouble handling their elephant.  We get a chance to learn something from experienced riders, and from people who spend their lives studying elephants, and from poets, artists and philosophers who show us the elephant-struggle in all its complexities -- but mainly we learn, and have to unlearn, from our families, and from our struggle to get out from the closed world of the family into the enormous reality that includes it -- which means that much is expected of us -- healing is something we have to work for.”

current projects

Aspasia of Miletus (article to be published this spring)
Philosophy of religion -- Portland State University / Jan-March
Existentialism -- Portland State University / Jan-March
"Critique of Heideggerian Environmental Philosophy," Oregon Academy of Sciences / 2-28
"Theism, Atheism and Human Flourishing," George Fox University / 3-9
Ancient philosophy -- Portland State University / March-June
Criticism and Healing (draft underway for the 2015 EPIS conference)

More on Lacan

Lacan offers a bit of a critique of the mirror stage -- not just exposition but objections.  Some ideas: this stage -- occurring between 6 to 18 months -- “places the primordial I in a fictional direction.”

It’s a mirage, a gestalt, a statue, a phantom, an automaton, an illusion, a projection.

A kind of fundamental hallucination

He says that the mirror-I is “more constituent than constituted” -- that is, this mere part takes the place of the whole -- stands-in for it -- fixes it, inverts it, sets it up as a basic opposition:

                                    Same                          Turbulent

                                    Thing                          Changing

                                    Over                           Over

                                    Here                           Here

Inaugurating the mental phenomena of the I -- the subject enframed into the mirror I

Lacan regards the mirror as a trap.  It sells the obligation to harden and become a ‘this.’

Fragment overwhelms whole -- simple versus complex -- stagnant versus dynamism. 

The thing that cannot possibly be seen as self-contained and self-sufficient -- 

is shaped and projected into a thing that is seen as wholly self-contained and self-sufficient

Some of his enigmatic sayings -- themes for thought:

from this point on the I that thinks cannot be the I that is

Return to Hegel: the I can only know itself in terms of an I that can recognize the I -- 
therefore self-consciousness can only fulfill itself in another self-consciousness -- 

'Future anterior' (Jacques Lacan) = later idea of 'Anticipated belatedness' (Samuel Weber)

“I am launching myself into a field to find out what I might have become”

                                                                 ?

Notes on Lacan

The Mirror Stage

According to Lacan, when the infant recognizes herself in a mirror, she is suddenly confronted with an image of herself – whereas she previously experienced existence in fragments intersected with libidinal needs -- the wholeness in the image lends itself to the seeking-wholeness looking at itself -- what the child sees in the mirror Lacan calls the "Ideal-I" (Lacan, Mirror Stage, 2). This ego ideal provides an image of wholeness which constitutes the ego. Like Freud Lacan thinks the ego is formed through an external force; in this case, the sudden realization of a complete image of the self that appears in the mirror; which counteracts an infant’s primordial sense of her fragmented body.

Words that Lacan associates with this event are: jubilant, specular image, mirror stage,   -- still sunk in his motor incapacity, nursing, dependency -- the I is precipitated in a primordial form before it is ‘objectified’ in the dialectic of identification with the other.

This image in the mirror is the image of coherence – of what makes the world and our place as complete subjects in it make sense -- the image has a framing, forming power. Internal self is drawn to external image -- internal ‘self-identifies’ via external. The mirror stage is the infant’s first encounter with subjectivity.  It reorients spatial relations.  It congeals an external sense of coherence, and with a sense of "I" and "You."

Lacan’s Three Orders

The three orders are the fundamental dimensions of psychical subjectivity -- they are spaces in which aspects of subjectivity are operating -- this is a way of situating the subject within a system of perception and a dialogue with the external world -- they are sites of trying-to-be -- these are the battlefields in which the subject struggles for its identity -- at first the most important part of the message here is that the thing we are struggling with in order to be is cultural -- but with a deeper look we see that Lacan is very aware that there are biological instincts and material realities --

The Imaginary

The imaginary becomes the internalized image of this ideal, whole self and is situated around the tension between coherence versus fragmentation. The imaginary can roughly be aligned with the formation of the ego -- which serves as the mediator between the internal and the external world -- it creates new potential-spaces

With his choice of the word “imaginary,” Lacan intends to designate that which is fictional, simulated, virtual, fantasy. However, the phenomena of the imaginary are necessary -- these are basic fantasies -- transcendental apperception -- also in Kantian terms, phainomenon

            The imaginary as the ego ---- I, adult, reality-principle

                        In Sanskrit -- atman

The Symbolic

The symbolic is the formation of marks, signifiers and language -- thus it is considered to be the "determining order of the subject" -- the subject exits the alienated body and migrates to the logos. 

"Symbols envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him…"

"The human being speaks but does so because the symbol has made this thing human.”

The symbolic order functions as the way in which the subject is organized and, to a certain extent, how the psyche becomes accessible. It is associated with language, with words, with writing and can be aligned with Peirce’s “symbol” and Saussure’s “signifier.”

The symbolic register refers to the customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules, traditions -- the stuff of society -- Lacan's phrase “symbolic order,” which encompasses all of the preceding, can be understood as roughly equivalent to what Hegel designates as “objective spirit” -- the non-natural universe as an elaborate set of inter-subjective and trans-subjective contexts into which individual human beings are thrown at birth (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit), a pre-existing order preparing places for human beings in advance and influencing the vicissitudes of their ensuing lives. 

            The symbolic as the conscience ---- culture, superego, repression, parent

                        In Sanskrit -- dharma (duty)

The Real

The real is that which resists representation, whatever is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary,   and pre-symbolic …

what loses its ‘reality’ once it is imagined (seen as a ploy for wholeness) or symbolized (made conscious through language).

It is “the aspect where images and words fail.”

Words that Lacan associates with the real:  ineliminable, foreclosed, approached but never grasped, umbilical cord … the real is everything that is not invented -- not media, but instead everything that informs media -- the real behind the endless cultural  hyperreality.

The real is that which is foreign to Imaginary-Symbolic framing and remains elusive, resisting by nature capture in any comprehensibly meaningful formulations of concatenations of Imaginary-Symbolic signs.  It is a transcendence troubling and thwarting Imaginary-Symbolic imaging and speaking from without -- as well as an immanence perturbing and subverting whatever is imaged or spoken from within -- it is restless

It comes to be associated with libido, matter, contingency and traumatic events, unbearable bodily intensities, anxiety, and death.  It is the hypokeimenon. 

            The real as the Id ---- child, instinct, wanting, needing -- pleasure principle --

                        in Sanskrit, tanha (thirst)

Notes on Foucault

Nietzsche shows that morality has a genealogy.  This does not mean that animals lack all moral sense.  Foucault shows that sexuality has a history.  This does not mean that sex is not biological.

Whatever else is true -- everyone has been shaped as a sexual being by centuries of teachings in the societies in which we grow up.

F: “It is through a process of designation or self-designation as a particular sexual identity that we are led to believe that we know ourselves, that we have discovered the truth of our being.”

F: “What needs to be examined is the oft-stated theme that sex is outside of discourse and that the only way to clear a path to it is by removing an obstacle and breaking a secret.”

F: “There is a significant difference between prohibitions about sexuality and other forms of prohibition.  Unlike other prohibitions, sexual prohibitions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself.”

Foucault shows how official knowledges about sexuality begin to infiltrate daily life.

One of his claims is that sexual scientists of the nineteenth century did not invent techniques and methods for uncovering hidden truths about sex, but instead they produced sexuality in its new incarnation as an official category of knowledge.

The compulsion to confess creates the confession; and the edict to reveal the truth creates the unrevealed secret.

Sexuality is a discourse in this sense (it creates a discourse -- it reaches out to this)

Eros poetes logoi

Love gives us a tongue, love speaks itself via us, erotic impulse verbalizes itself in the yawning, crying, singing, howling voices of the forest and, finally, among humans

Sexuality is a discourse because sexuality creates discourse -- makes us talk

Culture demands us to speak the truth about our sexual encounters, secrets and acts

When we examine the way power has evolved in Western history from tyranny to democracy we begin to ask the question whether we have still not cut off the head of the king -- in politics, the hierarchy lives on -- Foucault is asking: what about in sex?

“What I am arguing for is sex without the law and power without the king.”

Foucault becomes convinced that Western culture in its Christian tradition leads its subjects to conceive of themselves in relationship to desire.   Studying this history helps us see how individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves and decipher and recognize and acknowledge themselves in relationship to desire. 

Foucault’s early work describes the self as the product of the structures of society and downplays any sense of individual agency.  In later works he talks about the agency of the subject.  His approach to these problems is practical:

“The ethics of the concern for self is a practice of freedom.”

“I would say that if I am now interested in how the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these practices are however not simply invented by the individual himself.   They are models that he finds it is culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, society, and his cultural group.”

So he seems to be talking about a constructed subject and is not talking about an essential subject, and the subject is not operating autonomously but relatedly … responding to, rather than in isolation from, the society … and the subject has a body also and his species an evolutionary past, and he is alive ...

The point is to see how the self has been taught to see itself in the midst of power relations and then to seize this power dynamic for oneself and wrestle with limits and thus try to live-make the self 

What we see in the past is not a utopian template for restructuring our society or discovering ourselves.   Old models offer ideas and heuristic guides for questioning the limits and possibilities of projects for self-creation today.  We are studying history to be free in the present -- to help liberate ourselves 

The pleasures of the body were seen as natural but also dangerous because they appealed to man's lower or animal side and because their intensity could lead to overindulgence and thereby to a failure of mastery (enkrateia).   A certain amount of privation was felt to be good and to intensify desire such that austerity became a means of refining and increasing the pleasure when one finally indulged (hedone). 

“The achievement of self-mastery through the acetic ideal assured for the Greeks a form of wisdom that brought them into direct contact with some superior element in human nature and gave them access to the very essence of truth.”

“An essence of the Greek understanding of ethos is that it is a mode of behavior in which humanizing mastery of the self is not a denial of our earthly condition but is understood and even appreciated as pleasurable and beneficial both to the self and the other.”

“Ethos was a way of being and of behavior.  It was a way of being for the subject along with a certain way of acting, visible to others.  Its presence was visible in his clothing, appearance, gait, in the calm with which he responded to every event.”

“For the Greeks, this was the concrete form of freedom. This was the way they problematized their freedom.”  To keep something alive we must find a way to problematize it while we live it

Whatever the perceived benefits of austerity, many free citizens in the Greek culture enjoyed a full range of bodily pleasures -- austerity was not an authoritarian demand, an imposition or requirement, but a supplement, a guide to good living.

“The theme of sexual austerity should be understood not as an expression of, or a commentary on, deep and essential prohibitions -- but as the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its power and the practice of its liberty.”

The externalization of erotic conflict within Christianity, in which temptation comes from Satan and redemption is given by God, led to the subject seeking a new understanding of itself by means of renouncing mastery (self-control, moderation, balance), that turns the self, devoid of all of its passions, over to the will of God.

Beginning with the Greek erotics -- then in Christianity there is a new erotics -- ultimately in our own time we see several series of erotics developing serially -- histories make us think of possibilities

Although the discourse of absolute sin and evil did not make itself manifest until Christianity was firmly established, Foucault traces episodes in Roman history in which a line was crossed between austerity as a practice of individual freedom, and this new austerity as obedience to a prescriptive code of moral conduct.  This is a huge transition point in history --  it is also one of Foucault’s most powerful insights

Stoicism is a kind of midpoint: mastery over desire ultimately becomes insensitivity -- life without enjoyment of life -- mastery that has crushed the life out of life -- a victory that is no longer a victory

In one case a person sees the moral codes of his culture and is free to adapt them creatively to his own conduct -- in another there is a system in which an externally imposed series of moral rules governs the individual’s conduct via a regime of fear

Question: is there an ethics of the self that does not construct an ‘other’ as abnormal -- one that would be compatible with democracy -- with these various ‘erotics’ of the past, where are we going now -- we have to go on with the critical project and with questioning  -- the project of self-creation today -- reminders and inspirations