Where of one cannot speak, Gendlin's Felt Sense and Others

Almost an Inch

   The Oracle has spoken, Eugene Gendlin, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, was not a preacher. He was a Phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and particularly John Dewey, who like Gendlin was a New World Enthusiast devoted to the uncomfortableness and dangers of democracy, an advocate of reflective thinking and the value of an education system that taught the youth how to think for themselves.

  Here we have to remember that one of the reasons Socrates was tried for suborning the youth is that Athens was in the process of recovering from losing the war with Sparta. Athenians had been subject to a  brutal eight months rule by a pro-Sparta Oligarchy governing body history refers to as The Thirty Tyrants. The last thing Athenian property owners needed, as they pulled their lifestyle back out of the ashes, was a disruptive old man who kept asking negative non-trirelative, irony laden, petty questions when sensible Athenian patriots were busy straightening the line.

  Men like Plato, and to a certain degree Socrates, were searching for the Metaphysical Truth of the world, which once known would have solved so many problems of the "What Next." Men like Dewey, who called themselves pragmatic new-worlders and saw themselves as being in the world where they were engaged in solving the everyday practical problem of "What To Do Next" and "What Works" rather than "What's Real."

  There is a sense in which "What Works" is "What's Real." And there is a sense, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, in which "whether something makes money or not" is a demonstration of "What Works and What's Real."

  But here, August 12, we're talking the somatic of sense feeling, we're not talking right or wrong, we're not talking economic theory, we're talking Gendlin's Implicit Philosophy which places a burden on the unspoken, the "whereof one cannot speak," a burden he called 'felt sense.' This 'felt sense' is the somatic discomfort of the moments of "whereof one cannot speak" described as an unspoken 'felt sense' which when subjected to the niceties of Neuroscientists is a visibly neurological response to the moments before Wittgenstein's command when the "thereof one must be silent" is ignored and some form of speech emerges from the subject producing neurological and body, heart, pulse, breathing etc signals that suggest relief.

 A hot-dog dude moment of realness perhaps, but let's give that somatic moment of 'felt sense' a wider social context by raising the specter of Dewey's 'habits' around 'forks in the road' and giving it a moment to clash with Bourdieu’s, infinitely stricter and harder to change, 'habitus.'

  Both thinkers had this sense of a mental scaffolding erected by social circumstances, think of de Beauvoir being born as an ego-less being  into a situation, and realize that this framework or socializing process has parameters which do offer the stability of a cohesive group or place to belong.  Call it class, socio-economic status, Republican, Democrat, socialist, fascist, dickweeds  or whatever you want, that mental scaffolding has great influence on what individual minds react to "whereof one cannot speak."

 Dewey, the New-Worlder, produced his understanding of 'habit' in a functioning democracy where Reflective Thinking was encouraged and taught in schools by enlightened and passionate teachers. For Dewey the tool for active living could be reshaped. For Bourdieu, the Old-Worlder unaccustomed to the notion of a working meritocracy, understood a mind/body interdependence, and he produced the hard lines of his 'habitus' which explored a deeply ingrained social fate that feels natural precisely because society builds it into your body. 'Habitus,' for Bourdieu, operated below the level of conscious intent, it wasn't something easily changed, you couldn't will it away, pretend it wasn't there. Once a twit, always a twit. 

Closer to Plato, Bourdieu, who died in  2002, had more questions along the lines of "what works" and "what's real," than the pragmatic, and dare I say it 'transactional,' Dewey.  

 Of course you can just bypass all this earthy mind and body "what next" nonsense by giving up and declaring "Bite me! I am a Soul!"

Pierce's Semiotics, the triad and putting curves into Straight Lines

Blooms, watering can and a hose hopper

  "So what are you actually trying to say about Straight Lines and Trinities?"

 If you think of breeze and the sails of sailing ships you might be able to think of breeze as influence. If you then address Charles Pierce's Semiotics - signs, symbols and communication - where he insisted  that "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this trirelative - three related subjects - are an influence that cannot be resolved into actions between pairs." You might now conclude that minds are propelled by a breeze called triads or trinities that use words as symbols as they are blown into the corridors of meanings. And here, you as the interpretant are a third participating influence, or breeze along with the sign which is the word CAT and its object, an actual breathing cat that needs to be fed or whatever. 

 Unlike de Saussure, who concentrated his poststructural thinking on language around the signifier - the spoken word C-A-T - and the signified - the abstract image and understanding of cat that dwells in your mind - Pierce was of the opinion the whole combination that connects the cat form to the cat idea - the you - should not be underestimated and therefore in the study of semiotics there was a tri-relative - three related subjects - influence that could not be resolved by the actions of bi-relative - two related subjects.

 Pierce died in 1914, de Saussure died in 1913.

 "And your point?"

 Since those days, not so long ago, scientists of the mind and their terrifying machines, have determined that when the brain is engaged in routine task-solving, or cognitive custom and practice, it relies on predictable, boring apparently linear pathways that draw straight lines from Problem A to Solution B through a tri-relative process. (1) the Problem, (2) The solution, and (3) the subject, you or I, who more often has already mentally examined, carefully shelved and sanctified the solution to the problem long enough for it be classified as a habit of thinking that has achieved the status of "True."

 So when stuck in a loop of depression, or stuck in the loop of a failing belief system of predetermined solutions, those "There is no alternative" doctrines of the locust relieve common sense of its purpose by maintaining a triad that keeps the line straight, endless, unchanging until blessed release produces no actual somewhere else to go.

 But when the brain stops to actually think, it enters a genuinely creative state which neuroimaging suggests is a radically non-linear series of events. The brain turns to the wishy-washy parts  responsible for daydreaming, sometimes called memory-blending, and explores the glory of unconstrained association. 

 To do this, a mind intentionally breaks the triadic logic of "Given A and B, C must follow." The straight lines are gone, replaced by friction, anxiety, ambiguity, and a wandering that allows thoughts to drift out into the wilderness where unexpected connections hide behind or under rocks waiting to be presented as a possibility, sometimes called "hope" or "dreaming" or "the solution."

A "Just Is" that Curves Straight Lines

On The Move : Turkey Nursery

 "Trinity Thinkers. What are they? Please explain! I know we have looked at this before but at the moment if it was a question on a long bus trip I'd be a D-minus." 

 Let's make Kant proud and call them, as an example, Triadic Structures of Faith. We might begin to think of them in terms of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, how he thought thinking progressed from a slight disagreement between friends into a "dynamic process inherent in History and Reality." Here, for the billionth time we have a chance to raise the ancient specter of the dialectic, a three part process that starts with a statement or an argument, is then met by a contradicting statement or argument, and this potential for a third world war is resolved by combining the valid parts of both arguments into a new argument, or into the New Thesis.

 For Hegel and for Marx, their triad of the dialectic was a foundational axiom that produced a comforting  straight line of Historical Determinism that sort of lost touch with anything remotely resembling the curves of hope, the circles of dreams or any of those flagrantly subjective chains to heaven that have to be regularly polished, in case they rust away leaving a soul stranded.

 First of all, let's put something to bed. Creativity is a Just Is that  Curves Straight Lines in us people. "Artists," as defined by 21st Century US English Usage, are people who make a point of defining themselves and sell themselves as "creative." In the rest of the world, if we're lucky, "Artists" are still painters or drunks or confidence tricksters. Creativity is not a commodity, nor is it a skill that a data driven Agentic Intelligence can master. 

 The difference, my friend, is between "generating and output" and "living the creative act." If we return to Walter Benjamin's thesis on the mass production of Art, think ourselves into that time when to see the Mona Lisa you'd have to make a pilgrimage to Florence, or a castle in Amboise or since 1797 The Louvre. Look around for it now, and you can see the Mona Lisa hanging on many a wall, second hand shops, and post cards

 The market myth tells us that friction is bad—that the goal of life is to get from thought to finished product instantly, without effort.The machine can trace the straight lines of our past, but only a living human being can throw a curve into the future.

 Meanwhile structures in the mind of the self defined, and please forgive me for using the odious word, "creatives," have sourced their dawning sense of alienation in the myth of a fundamentally market driven trinity. And lo, our Over-lords having prepared the ground, have automated the soul first, because patterns in text and images were easier for algorithms to harvest than building a robot that can mop a floor or fix a pipe or say "have a good day" with a meaningful smile as it serves you a bacon and egg sandwich.

 Like the dismal loop of Beck's Cognitive Triad of Depression or anxiety. In comes the professional to bandage you up by taking the curves out of your line and straightening you up by suggesting a new trinity.  

Stoicism, the Libertarian Elect and Market Forces.

Turkey Tail Fungi

 Kant was sweet with his categorical imperative and his structures in general. You got to do something, can't just do nothing - was his version of Parmenides' own wisdom which offered "whatever it is, it must be, it cannot not be."

 Kant was a trinity thinker, he'd followed the classic vandalism standards of the later Bronze Ages, he'd straightened his curve with a three in one to keep us people from ever experiencing bliss, which in my view was unenlightened of him but you know, better than releasing the Kraken by not telling other people to think like Calvin and allowing Stoics to morph into limp wristed Libertarians as the Western Beatnik alternative to being a born again Christian.

To make sense of this rabble of words, you have to start with the Renaissance, which went on a bit through the 1300's into the 1600's and the early 1700's. The Renaissance was a peculiar reawakening, in my view led by Thomas Aquinas' attempts to broaden the horizons of the Catholic Belief System by reintroducing the church to an idea that science, while often the practice of heretical covens is also God's precious gift.

 If we go back to the ancient Stoics, and here I reference the Greek Epictetus, who was born a slave, and the Roman Seneca, who advised Nero the fiddle player, but not Marcus Aurelius, a Roman born in Austria who became a Roman Emperor, who might have done better with a personal witch doctor, a god or a psychiatrist rather than attempting to commodify a set of beautiful understandings with his imperial seal.

 These originals of Stoicism, arose during times of massive imperial decay and autocratic rule. A central maxim was to divide the world into what is in our control - such as our opinions, desires, and character - and into what is outside our control - such as the market, the Emperor, sickness, supply and demand, death and for Sartre and Schopenhauer other people.

 But, and I think this an important grasp for the dignity of cocktail hour Stoics, the ancient Stoics while they had an ethic of internal sovereignty, they were not "atomized individualists." They believed in a universal human brotherhood which they expressed through civic duty and an understanding of a cosmopolis, a world city that included all men, both free and enslaved, but probably not girls. The Ancient Stoics, the true blue pre-Roman Emperor from Austria Stoics, were not remotely Libertarian in their thinking!

 Libertarians, or atomized individualists or crude modern day sociopaths, are a mutation of the early Stoics - mutations of the Aurelius castle building cul-de-sac, rather than Epictetus or the practical ethics of the Stoic Seneca the Younger, a poet, playwright and a philosopher.

 Libertarianism took the Stoic emphasis on "internal control" and converted it into property rights and hyper-individualism. "I control my inner soul, I own my body and my capital, and no collective has the right to touch either." And it goes on into an economic coldness, the shameful frigidity of, "If you are poor or struggling, that is your individual responsibility to overcome through discipline; do not ask society for a safety net. Die silently please."

 Yes indeed, by straightening human life into a pure line of Contract and Market Exchange, Libertarianism creates a new aristocracy, much like Calvinism did. The "elect" aren't those predestined by God, but the "self-made" individual who successfully navigates the market without "complaining."

We are constantly told by Libertarians, market dogmatists assure us that "supply and demand" is a law of nature, like gravity or photosynthesis.

 It is not.

 "Supply and demand" under modern capitalism is a human-constructed set of rules that measures purchasing power, not human need and has no clue what a free market is. Those Axioms that emerge from the thinking patterns of Adam Smith and Ricardo are now jaded, old, unenlightened and illiberal.

 If a community has 1,000 hungry children and zero money, the market registers "zero demand" for food in that town. If a billionaire wants a third yacht, the market registers "high demand" for luxury shipyards. (Remember the Bush Doctrine)

 The great moral scandal of our gluttonous era is that we live in a world of manufactured scarcity inside a reality of potential abundance. When we let "market forces" dictate resource distribution, we aren't submitting to a natural law of the universe; we are surrendering human agency, morality, and reason to an unthinking accounting mechanism which defines the future as ever expanding.