Woke, Freedom, Habitus and Simone de Beauvoir

Mason Bee

  An acceptance of Pierre Bourdieu's structural scaffolding, the Habitus in which we confront the unwritten of our absorbed existence is rightfully useful. There within Bourdieu's scaffolding you'll find the 'situation' through which de Beauvoir's 'nothingness' becomes. In these shadows, you can if you're desperate enough, mandate or inspire new structural rules, but you can't force a human organism to thrive, and note the symbol thrive, under a scaffolding a human organism no longer regards as legitimate.

 De Beauvoir herself, despite her antipathy toward elements of the Habitus - she had some very cruel and self centered things to say about La Belle France into which she was born - was able to thrive because the scaffolding of her Habitus and her capacity to navigate her situation allowed her to thrive.

 Sartre's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am free regardless of the world I am born into. My consciousness is always radically unbound.

 De Beauvoir's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am born into a structured situation, a 'habitus.' To will myself free in the situation I have found myself born into is to will others free because my freedom needs a world of free others "to act upon and disclose" which is a way of saying I need something like a permission structure in a Habitus that allows me to decide what I want to become. Hence "You aren't born a woman, you become one."

 In her Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir put it this way: "Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men." She went on to write: "To will oneself free is also to will others free...."

 And of course it had occurred to her that since the Bronze Age, female humans had been turned into objects by male humans.

 "Where are we? I'm lost!"

 De Beauvoir: Freedom needs an open future of choices, just having free will inside your head, like Sartre, is useless if your 'situation' offers no real possibilities. If a person is trapped in poverty, tyranny, or rigid social roles, their future is closed off. We need free others to give our actions meaning.

 "Really?"

 If everyone around you is reduced to a passive, subjugated instrument, your own freedom operates in a vacuum and it becomes meaningless.

 "Really."

  Oppression, de Beauvoir argued, is a mutual mutilation. To turn a free, conscious "subject" into an "object," the oppressor destroys the very thing that makes human society dynamic. By closing off the future of others, you shrink the richness of the world you yourself inhabit.

 "You sound very woke! Or are you ant-woke?"

 If the scaffolding isn't legitimated by the free choices of the people living inside it, it becomes an enforced cage - one that degrades the freedom of those running the cage, too.

Gendlin's Going Forward

Woodland Liriope 

   "The Body Holds the Meaning First." Instead of blinking we'll think of the body holding the meaning first as a pre-verbal moment, it's an implicit understanding of a complexity, which might last seconds, hours, or years. If this implicit understanding is associated with a physical discomfort, a knot in the chest or belly, however it manifests, the physical discomfort isn't random physiology. It is what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, your sense of place, your memories, the panoply that defines the scaffolding or your being experiencing a pre-verbal situational friction that's combined into a single, uncomfortable complex somatic state that's not happy.

 Usually, what I am wary of calling the intellectual mind, doesn't know what precise meaning this sometimes delicate, complex somatic state is attempting to express. Is it hungry, does it need water, does it need a beer and a carton of cigarettes. Is it just tired?

  Believe it or not, and you might have to climb into your "woke" pajama suit, but the Phenomenological observations of our man Eugene Gendlin, inspired by Husserl perhaps, suggest that by a process called "focusing" you might be able to discover what ails an agitated somatic state by shaving away at the possible causes of discomfort your somatic state is experiencing by asking it questions. 

  Gendlin made the observation that with us people there was a going forward, which in my view can be understood as a consciousness moving through time. For Gendlin a living organism isn't a static object, life is an on-going process which is subject to a Trinity of Stoppage, Social Conformity and Carrying Forward.

  Go ahead, cuddle a Teddy Bear, life is a journey that sometimes stops. Conformity tells you to suppress the stoppage, take no notice of the pre-verbal meanings in the discomfort expressed by a complex somatic state, suck it in, join a gym, see a plastic surgeon, bandage it up, pay someone to listen, call the manager, get lost in first world luxury, don't even think about going anywhere new.

 Worth remembering agriculture changed us physically, we people developed genes that enable us to digest lactose into adulthood.  Hell! blame agriculture for real ice cream.

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 how 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 as 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."