“In order to establish a systematic relationship, or correspondence in time, from one event to another, it is first necessary to designate an arbitrary point upon a chronological scale….”
–David Neelin, “The Meaning of Chronology”
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“In Western music, the organized relationship of tones with reference to a definite center, the tonic, and generally to a community of pitch classes, called a scale….“
—New Harvard Dictionary of Music
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“After Artaxerxes’ death, Bagoas designated in every case the successor to the throne and enjoyed all the functions of kingship save the title. But of these matters we shall record the details in their proper chronological sequence.“
—Diodorus Siculus (Greek Historian)
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“There is really only one Game, the Game in which each of us is a player acting out his role.”
—Harish Johari, “Leela: the game of self-knowledge”
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“Leela is essentially the game Snakes and Ladders, which in the U.S. is the popular children’s game Chutes and Ladders….is really a 101 state absorbing Markov chain….”
—S.C. Althoen, How long is a game of snakes and ladders?
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“Markov Chain: discrete random process: a random process in which events are discrete rather than continuous, and the future development of each event is independent of all historical events, or dependent only on the immediately preceding event.”
–World English Dictionary
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“In the Gregorian calendar, 400 years are exactly equal to 146,097 days, and after such a period the sequence of ordinary and leap years repeats itself.”
—The Astronomical Institute Utrecht
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“A mnemonic can be found on a piano keyboard: starting on the key F for January, moving up the keyboard in semitones, the black notes give the short months, the white notes the long ones…”
—Wikipedia
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“To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
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“One can take the view that even with us there is still a tonic present—I certainly think so …“
—Anton Webern (Austrian composer)
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Introduction
I. Pessimism, Mortality, and the Will
II. Untimely Vocabularies: the first human canonballs
III. After Existentialism killed the Existentialists
IV. June Inside You: Snake Eating Tail
V. Don’t Judge a Superpower by its Corpse
VI. The Building of Bridges over The Taking of Leaps
VII. About the Author: Assembling my Vocabulary
I. Philosophical Practice 101
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Introduction
WHEN WEAPONS TURN ON THOSE WHO WEILD THEM: A CASE STUDY OF ISOLATING LANGUAGE
Linguists term “isolating” or “analytic” those languages which consist primarily of single-morpheme words. The morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic element, examples of which include “un,” “finish” and “ed”—which when strung together form the English triple-morpheme, “unfinished.” In the “perfect” isolating/analytic language, all words would be completely invariant, which is to say, devoid of suffixes and prefixes, tenses, plurals, and possessive markers. English is often deemed “isolating” by virtue of its relatively low morpheme-to-word ratio—particularly when considered in comparison to German and its Aufsichtsratsmitgliederversammlung, a term whose morphemes translate into the English “On-view-council-with-link-plural-completion-collect-noun,” i.e., “meeting of members of the supervisory board.” Synthetic languages are comprised of a high morpheme-to-word ratio, thus affording the complexity of linguistic formations as seen above.
Superficially, synthetic and isolating languages share the same goal—to retain and express meaning. But why do some cultures place the utmost value on complexity, so as to cram as much meaning into a word as can fit, while others prefer a different kind of efficiency, whereby words become tidy little units that lend to reduction? Are these differences indicative of cultural personality? A matter of preference? Such questions are the stuff of meta-linguistics: the study of not just how, but why languages are as they are.
I however am no linguist—at least not in the above sense of the word; nor is this work an informational essay on linguistics. Rather, the above informational metaphor, which enumerates the ways in which words can be made—through isolation, and again, through integration—to retain meaning: mirrors the processes by which people can be made to do the same. This essay is thus about how we, like our vocabularies, retain and express that slippery substance—call it “meaning” or “semantics,” call it “knowledge,” call it what you will. For while morphemes might be used as a metaphor for people, and linguistics for how “meaning” finds expression therein—we are nonetheless, in fact, and foremost, the stuff that language is made on.
OF STICKS AND OF STONES (Introduction, Cont’d.)
Consider the following thought experiment: if a world on the verge of annihilation could be spared via an indeterminate spell or secret code—could a life spent searching for these words be rightly called “meaningful?” Like a poem, the semantic potential and potential value of a well-composed, philosophical proposition, hinge on the strength and capacities of the mind that creates it. Philosopher and psychologist William James in his ground-breaking work The Will to Believe, attributes the validity of such claims as “life has meaning” to an active belief on the part of the theorist, or subject. Flying in the face of the Western Analytic tradition, James takes the refreshingly bold position that some of our knowledge is result of belief—insofar belief inspires action, which in turn procures evidence to back said belief, in the manner of the self-fulfilling prophecy:
“There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality’ into which a thinking being can fall.”
In the present writing, subject “S”’s belief that life has meaning “B,” insofar as this belief fuels the manifestation of actions or products that are testament to said belief’s legitimacy, will be shown to exemplify just such a “self-fulfilling belief.” For “world on the verge of annihilation” I will substitute the more realistic notion of “the western philosophical canon in a state of decay,” and then, in section 7, with “a single individual in the throes of chronic addiction, viz., self-induced decay.” As the reader can see, the “survey of worlds” on which the efficacy of the Self-fulfilling Belief shall be tested, represents a spectrum—the macrocosm of tradition and history on the one end, and the microcosm of the single human being on the other.
Philosophy’s unrealized telos, I will resolve, is just that latter “microcosm” or “individual” whose life literally depends upon his or her capacity for reflection—which capacity Society, despite its burgeoning excess of collective consciousness, has lost beneath the computer monitor’s monotone hum, and which almost everywhere drowns in prescription medication. Now, as humanity progresses a culture of dependency, and her self-reflective capacity shrinks rapidly away, the individual feels forced to assimilate and/or medicate the skepticism and purposelessness he feels as a “self” in a world wherein god is dead, art is dead, and long lives postmodernism. Herein we are faced with the following Conditional: if Philosophy, as the science of consciousness, continues on in its current direction—losing touch with the living, breathing people who need it, who invented it, and for whom it is thus Servant—it will die its proverbial death before the turn of this century, and who will be present at its wake? The living, breathing people it perpetually neglected, and who in turn neglected it, on the grounds of their exclusion from “the family.” Which “family”—professors and students of philosophy—will by this time have become so detached and aloof as to resemble an eccentric aunt, who’s now joined a cult, and so arrives with a suitcase full of pamphlets to distribute at the funeral.
As if to seal all of our fates: I look around me—and see in tired eyes what I see in my own, and know these people, whether despite or because of their estrangement, despite or because of the dysfunctional or bleakly quiet rooms that they call home, have too little energy and far too much dignity to seek out life’s “meaning” if that “meaning” is locked up in some distant and decadent ivory tower, while here, there are bills to pay and mouths to feed. Seeing this, I see no reason why a “call to self-consciousness,” even less so “a call to save philosophy” should be met with any response, save perhaps for the fulfillment of the prophecy above. Hence, “seeing no reason…” a reason we must generate.
The first four sections of this essay will analyze the results of some recent, and some not so recent, attempts in Philosophy to restore the worth of The Individual, by first restoring that of The Field. The first thing I’ll propose with regard to this procedure, is that most of its conductors after Socrates have gotten it backward. And literally. To descend in order from macro to micro, or ascend, if you’d rather, from the individual’s tools to the individual, is problematic no matter how you look at it. We will have the honor of examining said problems from perspectives housed both within and outside of the macrocosm, to determine that the problem is precisely just the walls which make this “in/out” dichotomy possible. Restorative attempts from “within,” as it were, have exhausted all but three possible options: seek tools for self-reflection in such “exquisite corpses” as philosophy schools and texts; go without, arrest development, and gradually perish; or make new tools out of old bones.
SUICIDE AND THE LANGUAGE OF IDENTITY (Introduction, Cont’d.)
The concern with, or question of, or fixation on mortality—whence arises cravings for immortalization, be its locus heaven, or some scholarly canon; the hereafter which is eternal, or the “here, after” which is “posthumous being in the world”—is reflective of the “metaphysical streak” we are possessed of, or afflicted with, as humans—on which grounds it can be claimed that we can never “medicate away” our consciousness of mortality, never “opt out” of existence’s race for meaning: as to do so would be to strip out the hardwiring wherein surges our lifeblood, our very will to live. Desire begets struggle, which in turn begets energy, motion, speed—and in the same way that the Sanskrit Nir (“leaving off”) when applied to the root Vāna (“the path of rebirth”) derives Nirvana, or being off the path to rebirth, the solution to the “great cosmic joke,” i.e., Human Condition, is the cessation of all attempts to solve it; it is the proverbial pen lifting off the proverbial equation; in a word: it is death.
It then follows, if the cessation of struggle must result in death, that struggle is implied by the being’s existence. She cannot be without struggling. Nor, correspondingly, can she be without consciousness—whence comes her knowledge of the mortality she struggles against. As long as you exist in time, my friend and fellow concubine—such that some part of you still resists the cusp of the hourglass’s pull—Death herself, more than any other “unknown,” is the subject of your dreams, your muse, your seducer. It is thus when the mystery and awe that shrouds death’s face at last diffuses, demystified either by spiritual enlightenment or skeptical ambivalence, that the dream ends; you’ve “won” in the dream-sense, in the non–sense of waking from a dream—which the seducer once haunted—which is now your reality.
That that flame does not go out with a struggle, but rather with, as T.S. Eliot says in The Hollow Men, “a whimper”—is quite clear; as would I argue is the sheer impossibility of extricating from any, much less all waking moments, such questions as what shall I do while I still have independence? What goals and moments, whose love to seek out? Where is Death now? Nietzsche’s proposal, so typically Nietzsche in its contrariness to popular belief, was that struggle, because it invokes the will to live, should be embraced by us regardless of any “greater purpose,” or more accurately, lack thereof. Nietzsche in fact requires all his would-followers to first “lay down her metaphysical nets” and admit that, except for those purposes we assign it, life is purposeless. In exchange, then, Nietzsche claims to offer us a philosophy that is as ironic as it is honest, because it is honest. He says, and here I take liberties to paraphrase: “In this world, which is all that there is, exist no absolutes, no truths with a capitol T; all that there can be, we create. The weak must die, the strong must struggle, and the latter, the individuals, are they who “win” life’s race—the prize for which is nothing but the ability to look back, in sweet defiance, and say of the past ‘thus I willed it’”
Like Nietzsche, I am advancing an ironic outlook on the nature of existence, the will to exist, and role played by one’s sense of “purpose” in securing the “identity” through which the will is seen. Unlike Nietzsche, I’ve no interest in stripping humanity of its “metaphysical streak”—which stripping is done merely to temper one’s longing for Nirvana, the Eastern counterpart to Christianity’s “dying to world,” or high from which the one who finally hits the “cosmic punch line” never comes down. I can’t legitimately assume, as the later Nietzsche claimed to have, that one need extricate one’s “metaphysical sense” just to prevent oneself from lapsing into mindless dogma-worship, aversion to struggle, unconsciousness, complacency, fates worse than death. Moreover, just as “decadent” and “symptomatic” as a reliance upon metaphysics, wherein the word “truth” becomes a crutch or a drug or a weapon—is the aversion to metaphysics, wherein child-locks are installed in the mind so as to prevent one’s “lying ” or “tired ” or “socialized” eyes to let illusion enter in. And in the same way that culture is lacking in its self-critical/self-reflective capacity, and would do well, I concede, to reclaim philosophy for that end—philosophy, itself unfulfilled, is lacking in telos, a sense of or belief in its (albeit contingent) purpose, function, personality, appeal.
Nor could Nietzsche—even having furnished his philosophy with, egad! personality and hay corumba! style—quite trust that he, or his contemporaries, or his successors would ever have the “will” to remain neutral toward metaphysics without thereby getting sucked in with its promiscuous claims to peace of mind, salvation, certainty. My criticism regarding this aspect of Nietzsche is two-fold: first of all targeting the over-generalization of his later attacks on religion and metaphysics, and secondly targeting the pessimism or rather fear by which he falls prey to aforesaid fallacy.
Of the first target: the early Nietzsche’s repulsion for religion is just one of many masks passed around by his target protagonists; among which: mob-think, “feminine” or “exaggerated” responses to the sting of rejection or the storm clouds of uncertainty, all-too-human “cults” wherein comfort and community and purpose gets bought at the cost of one’s will and one’s self-consciousness. Over the course of Nietzsche’s career, however, such flimsy and clownish “masks” as “Christianity” and “metaphysics” grow sinister, start forming to the sinister faces they were once meant dis-grace. In this turn, the philosopher starts blurring the lines between “one who is religious” and “the weak;” “creative influence” and “co-dependency;” between, essentially, Nietzsche’s self-created necessary and self-created sufficient conditions. Where once “mob think” stood as a sufficient condition for a group to be considered, by Nietzsche, “gregarious,” simply “being a group” now does the job. The church, the state, the canon of philosophy, thus shape-shift for Nietzsche into near-perfect replicas of his “evils”: unoriginality, mob-think, weak will—until we can no longer tell the malady from the sample.
Such an unprecedented shift in thought evokes a glaring error; for philosophers, it indicates rashness on the part of the thinker. But as one who advantages the occasional “literary flourish” over the constant droning of coarse “objectivity”—even if that flourish sometimes lends to deception, indulges ambiguity, conceals error—I am less concerned than most of Nietzsche’s critics with regurgitating criticisms of his wanting argumentative rigor. I am more concerned, unlike most of said critics, with exposing the fear which provoked Nietzsche’s self-censorship; which fear he kept secret from us, as well as perhaps from himself. Nietzsche grants, after all: “The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.”
The most common lie, indeed—unless one’s work is a reflection of one’s own inner dialogue, in which case the “lies one tells to himself” are simultaneously the lies one records and transmits to others. As in the case of Nietzsche. It is my claim, that the most common lie which Nietzsche believed and thereby led us to believe, is that he did not bank on such illusions as “purpose” and “certainty” i.e. religion and metaphysics—and would never let a trace of these infest his life’s work. On this point, this paper begs to differ.
I. PESSIMISM, MORTALITY, AND THE WILL
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Oh, how like a clock the lover lost its pale face and colored.
Numbers the longer you looked at it, until each phantom.
Tick of its innermost mechanism heralded possession.
And the mercurial sensation that something was slipping.
Away from you, until what once was your seduction device.
For measuring time had now become your myth: Abandonment.
To lead you, said the clock, said the lover, we must leave you.
And when there was no hope, when the wild horse watched you.
From the death field, you stood, frozen and alone, the black.
Willows ticking, this is your failure. Stop. This is your blossoming.
—Tessa Rumsey, “June Inside You”
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No concept is so loaded—so potentially conducive to both the survival and the destruction of a being—as that of mortality. To it we are constantly and endlessly returning—endlessly referring all others; from it we receive that most cherished gift of will, which manifests in the desires and projects which color the life and define the character of the individual. The phenomenon of willing, whether it adopts the form of a poem, a new-born medium of art, or an infant—suggests a finite being attempting to transcend its limitations. In short: life forms, insofar as they are death-bound, are born bound to “will.”
It is not because our earthly endeavors, our wars and revolutions, relationships and careers, are mediums of the will—but rather because they serve to distinguish “this” generation from “that” generation; this, from that people group, person, etc—that the human race is a race composed of “individuals.” Whereas the Owl can always be seen swooping down to prey on the Mouse, i.e., indiscriminately manifesting the will, via instinct, as a species—the Human Race may contrarily represent the same will in what seems an infinity of ways, for an infinity of motives not reducible to instinct, or the needs of the species, in a word: mere functions of survival.
Schopenhauer’s conception of the individual, i.e., human being, is two-fold—consisting of both will and of representation. The latter term is interchangeable with “phenomena;” it is the empirical manifestation of the will, the intrinsic and universal impetus behind every striving, every goal, every mode and machination of production and survival. Representation, thus, presupposes the will’s existence. Correspondingly, the will—or invisible foundation underlying all phenomena—ceases to exist in the absence of phenomena, through which alone it is conceivable.
The “will” Schopenhauer attributes to all living matter appearing in time and space, including plants, animals and human beings. As mere will, then: the human, the blackbird, the African Violet, are not unique—but instead are just one more iteration of the same blind striving, the same necessary and sufficient condition for life. It is through consciousness of our selves-as– representation, i.e. Will Made Manifest when Set to Motion, that we as humans stand apart from our fellow “willing creatures,” according to Schopenhauer. Self-consciousness, in turn, affords us the ability to reflect and make choices on the grounds of subjectivity, opening the door to potential selves, self-created possibilities, the possibility of the existence of individuals.
Schopenhauer’s existential successors would take the above account of humans as “beings who will and who yet will as individuals” as their enquiry’s springboard and telos, making it their goal to explain how existence can have meaning despite the limits and restrictions imposed by the species, which imposition is the essence of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic account of the will. The existentialist interpretation of Schopenhauer might be seen as an attempt to circumvent the following problem: If the will is “the homogenous given,” the inheritance bestowed upon geniuses and idiots, animal and plant-life, alike—then it is comparable to a genetic quirk that causes every member of family “F” to have a pasty complexion, a stutter, a gargantuan nose. As such, whether we conceive of the will as a curse, like the deformed facial feature, or contrarily, like a naturally high IQ or metabolism, as a blessing—it is what it is, with or without our consent. This conception of the will—the conception offered up by the pessimist Schopenhauer—posed the same problems for Nietzsche and his radical individualism as it does for the present-day American and her standards for a self-created identity.
To the 21st Century American, for whom “autonomy” and “independence” are near-absolute Values—Schopenhauer’s picture of the will may seem highly unsatisfactory, or at best—a point of indifference. Concurrently, since the mentality which idolizes the quality of independence will often also elevate that of authenticity, so as to look back and say to one’s past, “Thus I willed it”—the Westerner, be he a philosopher or layman, accepts with great difficulty the “will” whose every “whim” he has no say in. Heidegger identifies this mentality, or feeling, as “guilt” over not having created oneself. The Nietzschean affirmation: Thus I willed it—conceals beneath its boisterous clamor a deep sense of shame over having begged the question of a free, or self-directed, Will. The above quote, “Thus I willed it,” so laden with the Western obsession with original creation, has been rendered, since Nietzsche, the “mantra of Existentialism.” Rorty unpacks its significance to the school of Existentialism through the lens of Heidegger in the following passage:
“To say Dasein [the human] is guilty is to say that it speaks somebody else’s language, and so lives in a world it never made—a world which, just for this reason, is not its Heim. It is guilty because its final vocabulary is just something which it was thrown into—the language that happened to be spoken by the people among whom it grew up.”
Heidegger’s claim that “Dasein [the Western man] is [feels] guilty” [my notations] and Rorty’s explication of this claim—reveal the residual pessimism left over, from Schopenhauer or elsewhere, regarding the link between the Will and the Species—which pessimism translates in the works of the existentialists as fear, pessimism in its distilled form. So where Schopenhauer scorned The Will outright, for depriving him of some quotient of autonomy in favor of The Whole—the existentialists simply use positive as opposed to negative terminology to describe this same conundrum. Which is to say, the existentialists “pick up after” Schopenhauer’s pessimism—his negative definition of what the will is not—with a series of claims about what the will is and affords: a physical locus of power connected to the animal’s instinctual bent toward survival, and in its higher forms—creative solutions to humankind’s dark side, i.e., drive toward destruction: the quest for knowledge and understanding, worldly pursuits, religion, art. Indeed, compared to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s “Gay Science” is something of a fairytale, complete with rainbows and unicorns.
Far from a deconstructive reading of Schopenhauer, wherein Nietzsche might have otherwise exposed the former’s errors and from there reconstructed the will to his own theory’s ends—the late Nietzsche turned on his predecessor’s pessimism, but having built his philosophy on the source of this pessimism, could not afford to reject the will itself. He thus salvages the will, but discards key aspects of Schopenhauer’s model: namely, its ultimate banality and indebtedness to the species. Nietzsche allegedly departed from Schopenhauer where Schopenhauer goes on to divest representation of freedom, to attribute the ways we choose to manifest the will as individuals to such contingent variables as environment and history. Nietzsche integrates Schopenhauer’s “variegated” Man as Representation (ignoring the fact that this man’s “variety” results from his environment and thus is not freely chosen) and “life affirming” Man as Will (ignoring this man’s anti-individual implications)—and comes up with a model for the Human Ideal wherein the Autonomous Individual and the Willing Individual are mutually inclusive, nay, interchangeable concepts. The reason Nietzsche does this is, as I’ve stated, Schopenhauer would ultimately reject the radical autonomy of the will which the former later come to advance, and, since just this radical construction of Nietzsche’s was bound up in Schopenhauer’s pro-species Will, Nietzsche would be forced to re-describe this will—to reject, and paradoxically be forced to still work within, its bounds.
II. UNTIMELY VOCABULARIES: THE FIRST HUMAN CANONBALLS
Now, existentialism—according to popular folklore—was the first school of thought since the Ancient Greeks to proffer the “human condition” as philosophy’s ultimate subject, holding that Philosophy’s means and its end is none other than The Individual. Socrates was one such ancient whose account of philosophy echoes throughout the works of existentialism, which might again be seen as a manifestation of Schopenhauer’s “will” having found its philosophical expression in the lives of mortals. Perhaps this is why Socrates believed the task of philosophizing to be synonymous with dying, or “preparing for death.” In concordance with Socrates, my description of the so-called “philosophical disposition” (where philosophy is defined in the positivist sense of “a quest for truth,” knowledge, or understanding) as synonymous with the death-drive, morbido, runs as follows: If the search for, and integration of, wisdom, is equivalent of the will as a striving—in and through representation—for survival: then the threshold at which one’s search finally ends, whether in acquisition of knowledge or in a cessation of the desire to know, is the equivalent of death, where death can be taken symbolically or in the literal.
The famously existential attempt to prove the mutual beneficence of the Will and the Individual possible, relied on an integration of Socrates’ view of philosophy with Schopenhauerean representation. Thus the “will” for Nietzsche did not hinder but rather afforded individuality, such that Schopenhauer’s influence extended only so far as the former’s account of the manifested will, the individual-as-representation. Nietzsche was not interested in an “invisible substratum” which underlies and determines, if only partly determines, the motives and actions of the becoming individual. For Nietzsche and the existentialists, this sort of metaphysical speculation is precisely what philosophy, if it hoped to survive, had to break with—so as to return to a Socratic self-image which lays claim to both the will and individuality.
For if there exists no metaphysical, invisible substratum that binds us all to one another in one epic and gloriously-human sacrifice, in which each becomes, willy-nilly, a martyr for the Species; if metaphysics, like God, is “dead because we killed it”—the individual is then not at the whim of The Will, but vice versa. Thus begins Nietzsche’s supposed departure from Schopenhauer, leaving metaphysics in the dust of his cape-clad Ubermachen, the will-powered Superman. Or, on another interpretation, Nietzsche does with Schopenhauer what philosophers have been doing with one another since, arguably, Socrates—playing language-games.
In his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty makes a convincing argument for Nietzsche’s self-deception with regard to his influences and, indeed, his influencibility. It might be said that, as on Rorty’s interpretation, Nietzsche didn’t “depart” from Schopenhauer any more than Schopenhauer departed from his metaphysical predecessors. Nietzsche’s own obsession with transcendence, his rejection of influence in favor of self-creation, his affinity for the (albeit mortal-made) “sublime,” would eventually lead him to elevate the “will” to an extra-human (ubermachen) status. It would become his own, latently metaphysical, concept of the Infinite—wherein the super-human capacity to “re-evaluate values” so as to create them anew, became its own objective, bordering Absolute, value. From such heights he would inevitably descend and request that we interpret him not as a metaphysician, but a psychologist—one who is versed in the human condition, and trained to coax out remedies that were there, if lying dormant, all along.
Nietzsche elevates the capacities for sublimation in man—until, that is, the wall between natural and metaphysical idealism, between a New Athens and the Christian’s “New Jerusalem,” dissolves. Having painted himself into a corner of pseudo-metaphysical idealism, he calls to the rescue his alter-ego, the artist, who explains away “Nietzsche the Utopic Visionary” as a poet’s attempt to liberate himself through fancies and dreams. Nietzsche further enlists his earlier pessimism to alleviate the metaphysical implications of his claims, so as to say “even if he does possess subliming capacities, man has wasted them; thus, whatever Utopia might have been, can no more be.” Hence his verbose accounts of the “gregarious mob”—the majority under which his individual struggles, but can transcend only inasmuch as a squirrel perform a proof in Logic.
We are left with but two options: either we read Nietzsche as a modern metaphysician who is deceptively donned in such terms and conditions as “psychological/literary philosopher,” or we read him exclusively in the sense of the latter, and thereby fail to take seriously his philosophical work. The species-impetus cannot be transcended by Nietzsche’s superman if Nietzsche’s conception of the Will resorts to the latent metaphysics seen in Hegel’s “World Spirit”—in which case it offers no more than a watered-down determinism, wherein the “phenomenon” or “superman” or “will made manifest” is still at the whim of something greater than itself, something of which it remains ignorant by choosing to ignore.
* * *
So what, if not the will, secures humankind’s uniqueness? For centuries, philosophy’s answer to this question—whether coined “mind,” “knowing subject,” “pure reason,” or “soul,”—has been “that faculty which enables us to grasp unchanging, universal truths, as opposed to just particular facts,” i.e., the faculty whereby we derive from our encounters with such things as “yield signs” the concept of “triangle,” from a handful of gold coins, the concept of “multiplicity,” from the mass of gold the same coins create upon melting, the concept of “unity.” “Of all things, why this?” the reader may ask. “The capacity for abstraction? I mean, really?” To answer this question, I need only refer the reader back to the initial question: if not the will—what then? Philosophers, in attempt to prove our race unique, and moreover, to give this uniqueness a “firm philosophical basis,” for centuries have been forced to appeal to this faculty, insofar as it was presumably all that they had left. Thus, the demystification of this “abstracting faculty”—call it the intellect, call it what you will—puts our uniqueness as a species, and thus philosophy, at risk of endangerment. However, such a “firm philosophical basis” is not so easily found, and the philosopher’s cherished “universals” may be proven just as insubstantial as “sentience” and “will.”
That we can conceptually grasp something is not testament to that thing’s existence. “Can” does not imply “ought,” as it were; while I can see unicorns if I take hallucinogens does not mean I ought to see unicorns under “regular conditions,” i.e., does not mean unicorns exist to be seen in the world. And indeed, the argument has been raised and defended in myriad philosophies that while universal concepts can be “grasped” by the mind, only particulars exist empirically, to be seen by the eye. As such, universals, to which I’ll add “beauty,” “justice,” and “the good”—do not exist save for in language, in minds. Now, that we think that we can “grasp them” is but testament to our creative function—our affinity for patterns that is so overwhelming that we’ll note them where there are none, and to our imaginative function that is so overwhelming as to instill in us a belief in our imaginings’ independent existence. In other words, our “detection” of universal concepts with which “particulars” identify, speaks to nothing but our ability, and indeed, our tendency to fabricate concepts by which to define the things we see and encounter in the world. Neither, however, are these features unique to our species. For animals may be hypothetically said to have an equally sophisticated symbol system and network by which to communicate this system—one which relies on similar “means” as mind or reason to an end that is synonymous with the detection of patterns in chaos—one which exclusive access is granted to members of species “X,” and as such, are no different from humans in terms of function. The question then becomes: are animals just the a-lingual equivalent of people?—just as “unique” in their ability to organize data from their surroundings into compartments that can be readily grasped and communicated by their species? This idea can be demonstrated through the following simile: Just as Germans have concepts which the English speaker cannot accurately “grasp” via her native vocabulary, and vice versa—animals may be in possession of concepts that people are not (and vice versa)—the latter of which “sets of concepts” is no more “real” or less “real” than their a-lingual, i.e., animal counterparts. Humanity, as such, gets no closer to the “heart” of the matter, to the “thing in itself,” than do iguanas.
That “superior faculty” to which we attribute self consciousness is here reduced to a function whose distinguishing features are trivial, while its important or interesting aspects—the organizing capacity [intellect] which seeks patterns, and the creative capacity [imagination] that invents patterns where there are none, and the sympathetic capacity that via a collectivized system of symbols communicates with like-beings “concepts” of import to the species—are aspects not unique to our species.
The latter “concepts,” as I’ve just discussed, may be deemed “particular” by humans, just as we deem “triangle-ness” a property of yield signs, and likewise, “universal”—just as we deem three-sided shapes triangles. While animals, on the other hand, don’t have in their symbol-system such universal concepts as “triangle-ness,” but instead may at best be able to grasp and recall the recurring object they see popping up alongside the road near the field on which they graze—this point becomes moot when we debunk that of universality. They may translate and even communicate the yield sign using the same criterion as us, and yet the implementation of this criterion on a per-particular, as opposed to universal, basis—is neither arbitrary nor accurate, but rather a matter of preference. Each respective species may “favor” the usage of “universals” over particulars, of “patterns and forms” over “recognizable particulars,” and animals may just as well have concepts that are tantamount to “universals” on the basis of function, but not on the basis of kind. The point is that, if “universals” are contingent, neither the use or misuse or neglect of such concepts helps the subject to penetrate the essence of an object, but instead casts an accent over those features it considers most essential.
The consequences of reducing our “universals” to the status “linguistic concepts that retain meaning for a species,” or of shattering the “mind as mirror” metaphor, in which shattering resounds the accumulative efforts of the existentialists and their followers, are as follows: 1. Neither man’s “universals” nor the equivalent thereof as employed by another species is superior, in the sense of “an accurate representation of reality.” 2. In terms of why and how such “universals” were brought to fruition by any two species, those two are equals. 3. Due to 1 and 2, our uniqueness is “endangered” if by endangered we mean “leveled” with that of animals—for while we are different from animals—as they are from us—these differences are trivial.
Note: A less Schopenhauerian, more optimistic, rendition of point three, might read: Our uniqueness is accidental: manifested as opposed to essential, resting on meaning or what we take for “meaning” as opposed to “truth” in any absolute sense, in the sense that philosophy claims to furnish.
III. AFTER EXISTENTIALISM KILLED THE EXISTENTIALISTS
In the history of philosophy, the self-proclaimed duty of “metaphysics” has been to explain the fundamental nature of being and the world. The metaphysician thus appeals to an exclusively human ability to not just interpret the world as we know it—but also to access that world’s foundation. As “key holder,” then, to that mysterious realm wherein lies the alleged blueprint for all Creation: the metaphysican has proven vital to philosophy by first appearing vital to man’s understanding of the world, and by promising humans a reason to believe that we are unique and superior as a race. As stated in the previous section, however, the goal of metaphysics is jettisoned when we stop seeing our minds (or our languages) as a “mirror” for reality.
Rorty coins as “ironist theorists” those persons such as Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger, who attempt to explode (or draw to a close) the metaphysical tradition by “re-describing it” in their own terms; but whose theories, in so doing, stand subject to the same re-description by a fire squad of future Heideggers, Nietzsches, and Hegels. They are “ironic” because they realize the ultimate contingency—both historical and geographical—of every vocabulary: including, presumably, their own. They are “theorists” insofar as, contingency notwithstanding, they lay down their anti-metaphysical theories in said attempt to explode the existing canon. As such, their productions are timeless bombs—strategically planted in a self-contained system, to be strategically detonated by their successors.
It is precisely this eventual, and according to Rorty—inevitable, death-by-deconstruction by which the attempt of the ironist theorist fails. Says Rorty:
“This quest for the historical sublime—for proximity to some event such as the closing of the gap between subject and object or the advent of the superman or the end of metaphysics—leads Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to fancy themselves in the role of the “last philosopher….An ironist theorist is caught in a dilemma between saying he has actualized the last possibility left open and saying that he has created not just a new actuality but new possibilities. The demands of theory require him to say the former, the demands of self-creation require him to say the latter.”
Rorty then goes on to distinguish the ironist theorist, e.g. Nietzsche, from the ironist novelist, e.g. Proust. Where the former comes to “Ironism” armed with a theoretical agenda—be it a desire for timelessness or an anti-metaphysical “vocabulary” which vies for reception on a universal level, the latter wants only to liberate himself, to unshackle his mind and moral being from the vocabularies and concepts and theories the past would impose. The characters in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past are not ideas, not hypothetical syllogisms, but fictive people; any “moral” the reader may derive from their actions or the consequences of their actions cannot be deemed “valid” or claim “necessary universality” the way a theory or analytic proposition can. Such a “moral” may only be called “true” insofar as it is true for Proust, and/or insofar as it rings true for a particular reader, at a particular moment. Proust, then, escapes the “inevitable failure” of the ironist theorist by approaching his ironism without a theoretical agenda; he cuts the double-bind described above by not demanding sublimation, and liberates the vocabulary employed in his novels’ re-descriptions of the past, by interpreting said vocabulary’s function as primarily personal.
I argue in accordance with Rorty when I claim that, unlike Proust the novelist, Nietzsche the theorist achieved some—but not all—of his goals: he successfully re-described metaphysics, but could not “do away with it.” Moreover, the very attempt to put an end to metaphysics is synonymous with an attempt to destroy all philosophy—on whose very canon the theories of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger live their necessarily parasitic existence. Nietzsche’s success, as well as that of the Existentialists, lies in this: he proved it impossible to solve such reverse syllogisms as “life is meaningful” or “life has no meaning,” “the will is determined” or “man is free,” “universals to which we alone have access exist” or “we are not unique”—without appealing to a certain, e.g., metaphysical, vocabulary. This development’s significance to Philosophy is as follows: it is now possible to conceive of a world wherein questions traditionally assigned to Philosophy are rephrased, i.e., not tailored to a strictly Schopenhauerian vocabulary, nor to Nietzsche and his Superman—but rather, get lost in translation. “To lead you, said the clock, said lover, we must leave you.” Do you grasp the poems significance? As the subject of abandonment, can one fathom forgiveness? Can we logically expect to justify the act of leaving, to the ones we leave behind?
IV. JUNE INSIDE YOU: SNAKE EATING TAIL
The philosophical canon—like all collectives, families, and/or relationships—are systems of justification, and as such, are foremost self-enclosed. The reason Nietzsche’s attempt to liberate Philosophy from Metaphysics by writing a historical narrative about the former, “about successive attempts to find a re-description of the past which the future will not be able to re-describe” (Rorty, 108)—failed, due to Nietzsche’s own inevitable lapse into metaphysics. And why was his lapse inevitable, but for the same reason Hegel would inevitably appeal to a “World Spirit,” Heidegger to “Dasein”—the same reason the lover, still bound up in the “likeness” with which she co-identifies her Being, cannot justify what changes compelled her to leave using the terms and conditions of the beloved’s vocabulary: because to be fluent in a language one must first be submerged in it, because “to love is to drown in a substance you once begged to consume you,” because to answer to a system is to speak its language, is to appeal to its authority, is to accept its claim to Truth.
Genius or not, no one of the existentialists, nor any of their successors—could, or will ever, do more than to re-describe the past. Any attempt to do more than this, is inspired by the Western/ Heideggerian “guilt” over not having created oneself and thus not possessing a radical autonomy of Will, and is perpetuated by what Rorty describes as “the temptation of thinking that once you have found a way to subsume your predecessors under a general idea”—kind of like I’ve done in this essay—“you have thereby done something more than found a re-description of them—a re-description which has proved useful for your own purposes and self-creation.” To follow this “temptation,” and act as if one’s own re-description has access to a power that’s beyond oneself—a World Spirit, the Will to Power, Absolute Truth, God, etc. etc.—is to lapse, as Heidegger says, and does, into metaphysics.
Proust thus succeeds where the “ironist theorists” failed, if only in the negative sense of not attempting what the latter attempted. As I’ve stated, Proust’s success was of a primarily personal order: he re-described the past in a way that coheres, i.e., holds together as a narrative—thereby liberating himself from the narrative he was “given.” I will argue, however, that ironist theorists’ failure would ultimately result in a success in which Proust could not take part. That the Existentialists so lapsed—ere sealing their fate—does not take away from the “moral” their foundering served to demonstrate. The communication of which moral (which word I use ironically), I’ll argue was the ultimate intent and success of their philosophy. In short, because the existentialists left a trail of detonated bombs inside philosophy’s narrative structure—Philosophy is now paying mind to what these authors had to say, and more importantly—what they never got the chance to say.
What I am about to say, fits well within the framework provided by my Ironist predecessors—it is a statement regarding the status of Philosophy at present, i.e., in the postmodern wake of the existentialist’s realization that Truth is as contingent as the language we use to describe it, and that Philosophy is meaningless if not for its personal capacity, i.e., the value it retains—or can potentially retain—when bestowed meaning by people like the characters in Proust’s novels, and for the final id est, by which I here mean, the Individual.
V. DON’T JUDGE A SUPERPOWER BY ITS CORPSE
The Existentialists proclaimed “the individual” philosophy’s new telos—or destiny. But what of the individual? Certainly Nietzsche and Heidegger and Kierkegaard and Sartre could not have meant that I and yourself, Reader, and the kids down on Broadway ought to flock to the nearest University, enroll in 19th Century Philosophy after Hegel, and there render their prophecy fulfilled? The notion of institutionalized learning, as we’ve seen, couldn’t have been further from the late Nietzsche’s mind when he was trying—to what must have felt like no avail—to extract his ideas and ideals from that self-consuming “cesspool.” If there is a heaven, on which point I am indifferent, and if Nietzsche is in it, on which point I’ve not the foggiest, I hope he can see how his rebellious streak made an impact—even if at his, and the canon’s, expense.
Like the Navajo sand painting, whose function it is not to be “observed” by an audience, but rather serves as a “doorway” for the gods and healing spirits upon whose entrance the picture is destroyed—the value of the characters in a novel are objectively unquantifiable. They are fictive beings whose minds we can read, and yet the thoughts and beliefs and judgments therein are as glistening grains of sand on the medicine man’s canvas. It is no more the goal of the novelist to transmit the truth to her audience about the nature of existence, than it is the goal of the sand-painter to attract an audience for his work. Regardless, as one who does not believe that truth with a capital T is anywhere to be found, I would argue that the former goal is not even logically attainable.
While characters in novels, like actual people, are often seekers of the truth who may wax philosophical, who may hold and articulate justified, coherent beliefs—the reader knows better than to mistake these activities for sooth-saying. One only need read a few “classics” in literature to know “genius” is not tantamount to “keeper of wisdom,” much less Truth. Sometimes, while reading a stream-of-conscious monologue, or hearing a deeply-felt dialogue on film or in a play, we intuit that a “truth” is being spoken, for which the characters—and perhaps even the author—is but a channel. I would challenge the reader who can recall having had such an experience, to consider whether what she here means by “truth” is not in fact “meaning.”
The following proposal is not to be read as an attempt to distinguish between “meaning” and “truth.” Such machinations I’ll leave to the epistemologists who have not yet been taken off life support—I mean, who are tenured. My proposal, which to some will seem radical, to others obvious, is that the fact that we so fluidly substitute the words “truth” and “meaning,” is not suggestive of intellectual insolence, but rather of what close proximity their meanings must stand in our vocabularies. Since terms are as fluid as the intentions of those who define them, categorical errors or errors in definition that occur and recur on macrocosmic level, may after all just be a sign that our historical vocabulary is ripe, or overdue, for revision: linguistic phasing as Freudian slip.
If, like the Navajo medicine man, we intend our conceptual medium (language) to serve a functional purpose—we are content to call “truth” whatever “hangs together best in this context.” Contrarily, if, like the imitation artist, our intent is to garner longevity for said medium, and demand that it imitate “nature” or “reality” by which standard it is to be critiqued—we are closet metaphysicians, still believing in an Absolute Truth to which “meaning” stands inferior. This of course was the chain of reasoning which led Plato’s pessimism (inarticulable fear) of art. “Who knows,” he would say, “what these poets are capable of?!—enchanting us with “meaning,” deceiving our ears into believing we’ve heard truth!” Now, the further away we move from our Platonic origins, i.e., from metaphysics and absolutism, the closer we come to realizing the irrelevance of such empty concepts as “absolute truth,” and contrarily, the deep necessity of meaning, to life. This the Existentialists realized, but in their quest to demolish critics present and past—had to sacrifice in many ways their own sense of liberty and ownership over the meaning they lived to create.
Contrarily, Proust:
“at the end of his life….saw himself as looking back along a temporal axis, watching colors, sounds, things, and people fall into place from the perspective of his own most recent description of them….He was a perspectivalist who did not have to worry whether perspectivalism was a true theory.”
Rorty derives from Proust’s example a piece of empirical evidence that novels are “a safer medium than theory” for articulating one’s awareness of the contingency of one’s authorities—whether those authorities be people, institutions, doctrines, or words. I would extend Rorty’s lesson to encompass, beyond novels, any medium in which this sort of epistemic/philosophical awareness can be subjectively expressed—whether poem, philosophical treatise, or conversation. I say “subjectively” to distinguish the penultimate “treatise” from mainstream philosophy whose analytic currents have no patience for contingency, i.e., for the subject who is, like the character in a novel, “quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies.” Rorty’s “lesson” carries great implications for the future of philosophy—a future Socrates envisioned and ultimately died for, which the Existentialists “died to the system” to make the system see, and which we now—from within the space these souls have created—may start building.
VI. THE BUILDING OF BRIDGES OVER THE TAKING OF LEAPS
Between the “private” and “public” conversations which constitute the whole arena of philosophical dialogue, between “epistemology” and “ethics,” “theoretical” and “applied” methods, there exists a genus of practice that is necessarily eclectic, furnishing both private and politically-tailored motives and goals. Said hybrid has been realized by certain individuals who claim the title “philosophical practitioner” and whose works at the time of this writing are widely regarded by Philosophy as blasphemous at worst, experimental at best; and by psychology—if not criminal, then scandalous.
It is no secret that the “private” aspect of philosophy undergoes habitual neglect by academic philosophers. A lack of emphasis, willingness, and/or ability among our own, to integrate the realm of “work” with that of “life,” and thereby realize a personal narrative whose relation to the field is mutually informative, does a devastating injustice to Philosophy, to the individual, and to the world. The analytic trend which presently prevails in philosophical institutions involves the over-generalization from “applied” to “political” or “public,” such that the private aspect is either wholly neglected or assigned the role of an “aid” in and for the philosopher’s own theorizing. Analytic philosophy is particularly keen at strictly differentiating between “subjective” and “objective” analyses, and moreover between the practices which ought-be tailored to either mode. The effect this produces is a rigid conception of typically “public” vs. typically “private” realms of application, which conception perpetuates stigmas and taboos regarding cross-overs of methodology therein. Thus, applied philosophy, by virtue of the public role we’ve long assigned to it, is by definition divested of its “private aspect.” Correlatively, theoretical philosophy limits the “private” to the cerebral circumlocutions of thought which precede “actual practice”—the composition of arguments in books and in the classroom, where the “private” is again cut off to retain that thought’s “purity.” For this reason, academia, i.e. analytic theoretical philosophy, has shied away from the “personal” for fear of tainting or corrupting or abusing its function.
Hence the subordination of the Imagination and Understanding to the highly-revered Reason we see in Academia. Students enter classes, seeking clarity regarding their religious beliefs, their sexuality, the values imparted them in childhood, or the nature of art—and not only do they not find the Answers they are looking for—they are then roped into joining the program under the tragic impression that if they just hang around long enough, just get that second degree in philosophy, just read X many more books, just go to grad school, just devote the prime of their youth to the subject, they’ll garner truth. They’ll know. They’ll know with certainty. It’s a slippery slope—and such is the fate of the philosophy student who legitimately engages with the subject on a personal level. They are royally doomed if they don’t figure out, and fast, that their previous conception of Truth is an illusion—and thus can’t be accessed through a textbook, a class, a professor, or even all philosophy. Thus, those students who look to their professors, and indeed, to the academy, as models for how to achieve an accurate or just deeper understanding of themselves and the world—leave the ivory doors sorely disappointed, poor both in pocket book and spirit.
VII. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ASSEMBLING MY VOCABULARY
A word about the empirical grounds on which this author’s interest in Philosophical Practice, a movement still much in its incipience, is based. Long prior to my decision to pursue degrees in Philosophy, and even prior to the establishment of my commitment to the writing practice, i.e., at age thirteen—I developed an elaborate, conditional proof for Identity as Consequent of Self Destruction, or the condition properly known as Anorexia Nervosa. Eight years, three hospitalizations, and innumerable therapy sessions later—I recovered. Which is to say: I achieved a healthy weight and managed to “correct” the patterns and behaviors that years of addiction to starvation had ingrained in me—no small feat, indeed. Yet all but unaddressed remained a hoard of residual beliefs regarding myself and the world—beliefs which both provoked and perpetuated the illness, over time becoming my world-view default. By “world-view” I am here referring to a sophisticated complex of arguments, at base philosophical, which—however full of holes—I had neither the perspective nor the self consciousness to see through. The “cognitive/dialectical-behavioral therapies” employed by my treatment team, if necessary to my survival, treated my symptoms but did not furnish the tools for re-describing my self-destructive past, which re-description, in retrospect, is what saved me.
What I needed at the time of my treatment is what others still arguably need: Philosophy. Moreover, Philosophy itself is in need of an arena wherein nothing short of the “best” of both the private and public worlds is represented—a medium wherein the Subject manifests the Nietzschean ideal of the “self as work of art,” ripe for revision and re-interpretation, transformation as well as transforming.
I. PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE 101
Philosophical Counseling, more accurately referred to as Philosophical Practice (“PP”), identifies as an art distinct from psychoanalysis but which is yet built on a dialogue between individuals—a science, if you will, distinct from academic philosophy which yet retains its philosophical integrity. Its alleged appeal is its fulfillment of a niche that does not merely draw on the approaches of said institutions, but rather realizes goals that have been historically unmet if not disowned by both.
The pursuit of philosophical practice, be it as client or as practitioner, requires one adhere to, if not believe in, its premises: that philosophy can change lives by specifically addressing them, for one; two—that academia shirks said attempt with increasing religiosity; and lastly—that the apparent lack of “demand” for said practice is not a reflection on the practice itself, but rather indicates a dangerous trend: trends, to precise. These, one might describe in the general terms of “the western medicine movement,” or enumerate, if one so chooses, in a list which begins: “a deficit of self consciousness,” and proceeds” “a flourishing of systematic cures” then to “a crash course in statistics, wherein average means healthy, and exceptional means ill,” picking up with the penultimate “over-diagnosis”—whereon asterisks denote: “if not alcohol—then Prozac.” Philosophy, at least the version that is most often doled-out in schools, falls somewhere above suicide and somewhere below enlightenment on the list of alternative remedies for the life’s trials. The problem with such alternatives is that, if used without discretion, they become just as addictive as the substances one seeks to avoid: psychic detachment as medicine surrogate on which one may successfully escape oneself, may grow happily dependent, may overdose.
In his article entitled Beyond the Walls of the Philosophical Prison, philosophical practitioner and scholar Ran Lahav draws a poignant parallel between academia and orthodoxy, stating that the former
“limits philosophy to a very specific kind of discourse, and it suppresses other potential forms of discourse. In Western philosophy, this happened when philosophy became focused on abstract discussions that are aimed at producing theories, while ignoring virtually every other way of understanding life”
—just as orthodoxy may be said to “theorize” or “dogmatize” or “explain” away the ineffable, the difficult (because mysterious) and because mysterious, beautiful—complexities and paradoxes which constitute the nature of existence, among which we might include love, as well as existential anxiety and spiritual revelation. Practitioners working in the embryonic field of PP, among whom Lahav stands as an exceptionally innovative figure, claim to offer an approach to philosophy which saves it from the fate outlined above, and to which the Western world has succumbed on the levels of medicine, education, and spirituality, to name just a few. Those like Lahav who have achieved sustainability, have had to argue—and vehemently—their way to this achievement. For academic philosophers and clinical psychologists alike cast an eye of suspicion, and perhaps rightly so, on this grass-roots movement which claims to know something that the former, its elders, don’t know. On this account, however, the territorial suspicion on the part of philosophy and the behavioral sciences is arguably unfounded; it is the natural however irrational revolt of the organism whose intelligence has been insulted, i.e., who has been hit by a girl. This “female imaginary,” ironically enough, first appeared in the flesh of a man known as Socrates—a philosopher who referred to himself as a metaphorical “midwife” for wisdom:
“The highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth. I am so far like the midwife, that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom….I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me.…Those who frequent my company at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent; but, as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves, although it is clear that they have never learned anything from me; the many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is heaven’s work and mine.”
The above historical aside is less an aside than some philosophers would like to admit, for Socrates’ method—“the dialogue” as opposed to the “monologue,” the “question-” as opposed to the “argument-“ oriented discussion—represents the “feminine,” and simultaneously, the origins of philosophy. Philosophical Practitioners are in almost unanimous agreement upon the importance of the Socratic Question to philosophical dialogue—whose powers of suggestion for the probing subject have been lost or long—repressed?—by academia. The PP movement can only realistically be charged for suggestion, i.e., of surfacing in the mind of the philosopher-scholar the personal capacity he’s forgotten, through its very appearance. In other words, the practitioner appears as a threat to the academic’s familiars—his syllogisms, his podium, his orderly proofs—insofar as the latter recognizes but does not want to realize his personal-reflective capacities.
On the other hand, to those who neither realize nor recognize said potential as institutions or individuals, the practitioner appears as a threat to the field as a whole, in which case she is charged for infidelity, blasphemy, fraud. As is stated above, the suspicion holds only for charges of suggestion—and thus for dredging up, like the mnemonic device of the psychologists, a past that had actualized the potential that now lies dormant: the Socratic imaginary, the feminine, the personal.
Just as one may question the integrity of “academic motives”—the egoistic drive for recognition, and imperialistic lust for power via knowledge: academics may question the integrity of the flight there from. Let us, for argument’s sake, return to the discussion of Schopenhauer’s “Will,” and beg the question that the purpose shared by all human actions is in fact just “to generate within that action’s agent the will to live.” If such were truly the case: is “academic philosophy” any less legitimate, any less pure, an endeavor than that of the practitioner? Moreover, is it possible that the philosophical practitioner, along with those he or she counsels, along with Proust, Nietzsche and, why not, Hegel—just a different manifestation of the will to go on living—such that, where the academic’s and/or artist’s existence is fueled by creations that are tangible, the counselor and/or counselee just require a different type of fuel? And if so, is PP’s objective, like that of the academy, purely relative? Alright—what if?
By advancing a policy of “non-interference,” wherein the goal of the practitioner is never to advance his theories or “how-one-ought-to-live’s,” as this is precisely the goal he is trying to break with—PP consequently upholds a standard of Coherentism. As such, the mutual objective of practitioner and client negates the idea that knowledge—be it about the self, morals, or the meaning of life—must rest on a foundation of “universal necessity.” Instead, Coherentism claims that a person has “knowledge” when, and only when, she is in possession of coherent beliefs. But what counts as coherency? “Coherence,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is defined by logical and probabilistic consistency, as well as the existence of strong and extensive inferential connections between the beliefs within the system in question. Thus, beliefs are not “justified” via universally verifiable and enforceable terms and conditions, but rather in terms of the inner coherency of the system they comprise.
In accordance with the Coherentist notion that your beliefs need not mirror mine for both the former and latter systems to be justified, the practitioner treats his “student” not as an objectifiable proof in philosophy—but as an a apprentice, a philosopher-in-training. Just as Andrea del Verrocchio showed da Vinci “the ropes”—only to prove the latter’s artistic subordinate—so does the practitioner, or “master of philosophy,” teach his client to use his tools with the intent, indeed the hope, that his client will found in his or her Sistine Chapel, a style, a method, a creation of her own. Whereas academic philosophy may be seen as equivalent of Art School, wherein students mimic professors who mimic masters whose theories they like most, or which the art-world deems “infallible”—the philosophical practitioner’s office bears resemblance to the studio: that realm wherein the student tests out her wings, her skills, taking liberties to experiment and seek out her own unique vision, then determining if that vision was justified by what she has to show for it.
Far from referring to the above parallel—between artisan and philosophical practitioner/ PP and Coherentism—in the negative, I do so only as to posit this admittedly private concern: are the fields of psychology, philosophy, and philosophical counseling—just so many means to the same end—a decrescendo into relativism, at that? Here we must be careful to distinguish between “relativism” and “Coherentism.” The two are often misconstrued as synonymous, namely by positivist analytic philosophers who fear the destruction of epistemology in the hands of the skeptic. Skepticism, however, is precisely an argument against said construal—in that the skeptic is as skeptical of the Coherentist notion of Truth as he is of all others—positivist, externalist, what have you. In short, skepticism doubts the existence, nay, the value of truth in general. Thus, while the Coherentist notion of truth as something that is “based on the strength of subjective inferences” proffers a threat to those conceptions of knowledge as a thing to be objectively determined, proven and agreed upon—it is not “the same as skepticism.” For a more in-depth analysis of this distinction I’ll refer the reader to my essay Between Coherence and Convergence, also available on my blog.
The three disciplines here discussed: psychology; its self-proclaimed antithesis, or philosophy; and the hybrid of these, as achieved by the philosophical practitioner—can be interpreted as three distinct means to the same end. Psychology may be described as: “the will of the individual, translated into space as a pursuit of ‘peace,’ ‘health,’ and/or ‘functionality;’” Philosophy, as “the same will, translated into space as the creation of tangible products whose value is mutually contingent with that of The Canon;” and philosophical practice, as a hybrid of these objectives, such that “individual subject ‘S’ employs the Greek motto ‘know thyself’ to derive psychological effect ‘P,’ which in turn propels her conscious journey, or life narrative—brought to completion at death as a “true” work of art.
