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!"