Author Archives: alethia0

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Inaugural post: Getting to know Goethe (by Brandy George)

Hi, there. =D If anybody bothers to read this, apologies for the length. God knows I won’t usually have the time to be so self indulgent. =D

Ahem.

How would the thing describe itself if it had the ability to speak?

I really love this, since I do not understand “language” as the representation of experienced phenomenon in signifying words or images or in sounds or symbols, but rather, I experience the phenomena as such as signifiers, with the only true “signified” being the potential significances of which all signifiers are themselves an expression.

Accurate description is not a phenomenological end, however, but a means by which the phenomenologist locates the phenomenon’s deeper, more generalizable patterns, structures, and meanings.” (Emphasis mine.)

Meaning here is especially meaningful for me, =) as I feel that reductionistic science, in taking its own verbal concepts literally, its own theoretical models and representations of reality as reality, has no ability to truly understand natural phenomena and processes as language(ing). If it does presume to understand this language (as in referrals to “genetic texts” and “cellular communications”), it is only as an autonomous sign system devoid of any semantic dimension, which is to say absent of any Meaning (and I believe there are ways of understanding meaning that are not reducible to mere “artifacts” of the cognitive occasion/subject).

Delicate empiricism, the effort to understand a thing’s meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience.

“Empathetic looking.” How different this is from the dissociated, objectifying, monological examination with which we are wont to approach nearly everything and everyone. (I say “examination” because I dare not use so intimate a word as “gaze” in association with the ontologically alienated and alienating approach of reductionistic science).

Natural objects…should be sought and investigated as they are and not to suit observors, but respectfully as if they were divine beings.

At the time of this posting, the above quote is my favorite passage thus far, since it speaks with such poetic accuracy to the I-Thou relationality that reveals the wholly other (that which we take as a mere object) as the presencing of the Holy Other.

One instance is often worth a thousand, bearing all within itself.” Goethe
… … … Amen. =)
How difficult it is . . . to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word.
Indeed, especially if one has not read and deeply understood Gendlin. =) For me, Goethe’s reflection contrasts the semiotics of reductionistic science with an authentic phenomenological semiotics – one that does not reduce the meaning of phenomena to their place within already established patterns of significance.
As one learns to see more clearly, he or she also learns to see more  deeply . One becomes more “at home” with the phenomenon, understanding it with greater empathy, concern, and respect.
“Empathy, concern, and respect.” This reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh talking about caring for the cup when you put it away in the cupboard, and how the cup does not like to be handled mindlessly. I feel we are too quick to assume that his real concern is strictly the effects of mindlessness on the human being and our “practice,” but I feel that this would be to miss the radicalness of the teaching as a recognition that what we take as “objects” can not properly (with ontologically intimate beholding) be “under stood” as such (at least in the terms that we are conventionally accustomed to thinking about and perceiving them).
There may be a difference…between seeing and seeing… The eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connexion with those of the body, for one otherwise risks seeing yet seeing past a thing.
I feel when we are really seeing we see that every*thing* is seeing (intransitive verb) and that we ourselves see as we are seen (though I prefer and have long used the word “beholding” as it is, for me, much more ontologically intimate and evokes the “bodying” of God as incarnated *in* phenomena). This reminds me of some of Alex Grey’s work, where all apparent surfaces or “bodies” are rendered with/as eyes, as the bodying of seeing and the seeing of bodying:
Goethe believed that the powers of human perception and understanding cannot penetrate beyond the ur-phenomenon. It is “an ultimate which can not itself be explained, which is in fact not in need of explanation, but from which all that we observe can be made intelligible.
“Which is in fact not in need of explanation.”  Damn straight! =D This reminds me of the absurdity of the “hard problem” in neuroscience (it is neither hard nor a problem).  I am struck here with the significance of what I might differentiate as compulsive egoic explanation (subtly violent imposition) from freefull archetypal revelation (non-violent gnosis).
The highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.
Jason Brown would love this first part, yeah? I love the way this can function as a corrective to the false notion that theory is, by definition, “disembodied” or divorced from lived experience. So Goethean science lets us live in a liminal space between perception and theory,  with “theory” going back the Greek root, meaning to see or behold. As Arthur Zajonc said in an interview with Otto Scharmer: “To do theory means to come to the place where one sees more deeply, where one beholds. So it has, in that sense, a direct encounter associated with it, as opposed to one mediated through what we would normally call theory, namely models that stand between us and experience. It’s quite the obverse. One actually heightens experience to the point of true, intimate beholding.”
Person and worldall point toward an instantaneous, living dialectic that joins the parts in a dynamic, interpenetrating whole. This relationship…is a “a creative conservation between within and without…for what is within and what is without are…merely poles ["regionings"] of one and the same *thing*.
Incidentally, this is closer (though not close enough for my taste) to how I have  (apparently mistakenly, according to the definitions I’ve heard explicated in the Magellan tutorials) understood the word “dialectic.” (I have always understood dialectic as pointing to transitivity of relation‑and‑self‑relation as immediate and primary, which compels me to disagree that the “parts” or poles are in need of “joining” or synthesis, since neither part nor pole is primary but rather is always already interpenetratingly co-constituted, not  as “one and the same thing,” but as self-mediated Immediacy, as the Opening *of* Emptiness).

‘To understand,’ suggests Bortoft, ‘is to see the way things belong together and to see why they are together as they are.’

What can I say? Bortoft is a sexy beast for saying (elsewhere, though I imagine this quote will show up later in the reading), “A part is a place for the presencing of the whole.”

Goethe’s method teaches a mode of interaction between people and the environment that involves, reciprocity, wonderment and gratitude.

More I-Thou awesomesauce! Woot!

I esteem the universe all the more since I have known it is like a watch. It is surprising that nature, admirable as it is, is based on such simple things.

By this I can only conclude that our hapless Countess was smitten with de Fontenelle and was hoping to get herself laid. ;)

Yet it would be a great error to imagine that the Romantics, particularly Goethe, opposed Science. The problem was not with science as such but with the specific type of science then [and largely now, especially as relates to medicine] practiced. The task therefore, was one of transformation [or what my religious-hearted self might rather experience as "redemption"], not rejection.

I see “science” (that is, reductionistic science, or scientism), as bearing within it a profound integrity against which it has been artificially and tragically turned as a sort of intimate alienation. As such, my Christian sensibility behooves me to regard it as a “lost sheep” which must be reclaimed and redeemed (self-transparently re-turned) to the (en/un)Fold(ing), or to the wholeness to which it belongs and from which it cannot ultimately depart. To this end, I propose phenomenological science not simply as an alternative method of qualitative scientific research of particular or exclusive relevance to the human sciences, but as the basis of any truly fundamental science. 

‘Poetized’ science.

Be still, my heart! =D

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Brandy – JB: Care-full critiquing…

So, Jason Brown is such good grist for my mill, such a whetstone to the blade of my Question, and such ointment to my Gadfly. =) I am choosing to take a very critical position here, NOT because I enjoy being a contrarian (I feel painfully vulnerable  - anybody who might comment, please be very gentle and care-full with the Life that I am) or am blind to Brown’s sound and significant and moving insights, but simply because my critique is an expression of a commitment to something I care deeply about (which is the ontological significance of human Suffering and b/Being/s in pain); something which I believe is not only exiled within but innocently de-meaned by Brown’s work. I may be mistaken in my understanding of Brown – I am very willing to allow for this – for all I know, he may be a noble champion of the Life, the Adamantine Fragile, the Indomitable Vulnerability, that is living and languaging each of us, and I may not  possess the intellectual acumen or psychic sensitivity to adequately see and appreciate this. The “issue” I take with Brown might not even be a real issue, but it is a real issue for me, and it is to my own “situatedness” that I must show devotional fidelity. Regardless of whether I misunderstand Brown, the beating, bleeding heart of my advocacy stands, even as this stand is shaping and shaped in and as and through and by this field of pulsating presence…

 

[It is] a misconception that symptoms are aberrations or deviations from then normal, when, in fact, the important of a symptom is that it reveals a process directly. The process is displayed (prematurely) in the symptom.

I consider Brown’s work to be exquisitely symptomatic (and I intend absolutely no pathologizing sarcasm here). This is not to say, as with all symptoms, that it is without deep integrity and dignity and beauty and coherence, but simply that I feel it evidences dimensions of “dynamic arrest” in its process (Brown’s legitimately advanced understanding is, in my estimation, in many ways “pre-mature”). Were this symptomaticity (which is none other than b/Being in pain) to become reflexively self-transparent, the antidote would be discovered within the poison, and that which is the sourceless sourcing of both poison and antidote (that which is intimately announcing its alienation) could be co-creatively enjoined in and as conscious Care toward a preservative negation of his current theory. The Gospel of Philip seems germane here: ”If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” It seems to me that Brown has (innocently) not brought forth the intersubjectivity (and by intersubjectivity I am not speaking to a specifically human phenomenon) hidden to him in plain sight within his theory, and that this is destructive to his theory in that this “exiled” intersubjectivity is “presencing” its absence through its symptomatic solipsism. Were this solipsism to be seen as a symptom rather than a seductive but artificial solution to the “chicken or egg” question, it itself would be revealed to contain the concealed key to its radical redemption (even in and as its always already Great Perfection).

 

*Awareness* does not search out a content but is produced by the content it is looking for.

The primacy of the Question, which is Languaging. “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man…language is the house of Being ” -Heidegger

In response to the question of whether language is prior to experience (or for that matter whether cognition and brain states are correlated), I would ask if both “language(ing)” and “experience(ing)” have been investigated as such and if “correlation” can accurately express the actual relationship between what we call “cognition” and what we call “brain states”? (Heidegger: “We cannot say that the organ [brain] has capacities but rather that the capacity has organs. We [think/are thought], not the brain.” This is also to say that we think not because we *have* brains but that that we have brains because “Thinking” – as trans-cognitive and trans-neurological – is a field potential and pattern of Being incarnating as human Dasein.) My response as to whether language is prior to experience is that neither is prior, that Silence is Speaking (and by “Silence” I do not mean the dialectical counterpart to “Speaking”) and that languages are organizing field patterns of significance corresponding to different organizing field patterns of awareness that are s/Self-experiencing as Self-mediated Immediacy (which cannot be the private possession of a cognitive or localized subject). I do not understand “language” as the representation of experienced phenomenon in signifying words or images or in sounds or symbols. Rather, I experience the phenomena as such as signifiers, while the only true “signified” is the potential significances of which all signifiers are themselves an expression.  

 

There is always a context around a local theory, which is its area of weakness. The more local the theory – and scientific theories tend to be extremely local – the less the theory explains. Theory does not spring from data but arises as an insight about the context in which the data appear.

If data appear in context, what does context appear in or to? How many things or conditions do we ignore as being irrelevant and on what basis does we judge this? Certainly not simply on other facts, because facts do not speak for themselves. We always rely on the state or body of awareness as a field within which these facts find co‑ordination and interpretation as events taking place within a system that is already functioning with drives, perspectives, and directions, and thus events which are both conditioned by this field, and, in turn, condition the field such that in their interaction we are directed to and as those events that have significance for our state. 

 

A complete theory of color vision is also a theory of object and space perception.

Since Galileo and Locke, the modern scientific worldview, far from being “materialistic” has been “idealistic” in principle, relating to its own mental and mathematical concepts and measurable variables as more real than the immediately experienced phenomena or qualities that they are supposed to “explain.”  (E.g., the abstraction of quantitative frequencies of light are treated as more real than the experience of color.) What sort of “light” is it with which the brain supposedly produces illuminated perceptual images – not only in the waking state, but also in dreaming? “Empirical” research has shown that a two-way relation exists between brain and eye, the brain actually sending signals via the optic nerve to the eye in waking life as it does when we dream. But even such research offers no answer to the fundamental question of, what is the relation between our awareness of light on the one hand, and the light of awareness on the other?

 

In a very real sense, everything needs to be explained before anything can be understood.

“All explanation reaches only so far as the explication of that which is to be explained.” -Heidegger

 

In other words, the true referent of the perception is not the physical object “out there,” but the more proximate brain state correlated with that perception.

I find this deeply troubling and ontologically violent. I believe Buber and Levinas would roll over in their graves (despite Brown’s subsequent altogether unreassuring assurances that he is not altogether ignorant of the reality of Thou). “When it is claimed that brain research is a scientific foundation for our understanding of human beings, the claim implies that the true and real relationship of one human being to another is an interaction of brain processes, and that in brain research itself, nothing else is happening but that one brain is in some way “informing” another.  Then, for example, the statue of a god in the Akropolis museum, viewed during the term break, that is to say outside the research work, is in reality and truth nothing but the meeting of a brain process in the observer with the product of a brain process, the statue exhibited. Reassuring us, during the holidays, that this is not what is really implied, means living with a certain double or triple accounting that clearly doesn’t rest easily with the much faulted rigour of science.” -Heidegger

I think that now that I’ve been spoken as I have, I may be able to simply plow ahead into Brown’s work without needing to critique “every little thing.” Despite my dissonance and dissatisfaction with dimensions of his work, the Question compels me to continue because, within this context, it is growing every day more pregnant with Response.

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Brandy – JB: Preface, page 47, to hiccup in Chapter 1, page 6

Page 47

Everything unholy is the birthmother of what is sacred.

In Goethe’s Faust, Faust asks the Devil, “Who are you then?” The Devil responds:

Part of that Power which would
the Evil ever do, and ever does the Good.

 

Page 47

Is God recursiveness, cyclical return or linear flow, probability or causation, the inferred or the evident, the affirmations of the priests or the negation of the mystics, the shalts and shalt-not of moral duty, determinism or freedom, culpability or penitence?

From whence comes the Question? Who might be asking it? And more mysteriously, why?

“Man is the question he asks about himself before any question has been formulated.” -Tillich

The kanji of the Tao is “Face Walking.” Indeed, “till we have faces.”

 

Page 50

The search for the timeless is a manifestation of the wish to escape transition.

Though the search for the timeless may be a manifestation of opacity to the nature of transitivity and its relationship to being and time, it is equally the achingly ecstatic activity of this, happening as the peek-a-booing seduction of Shiva hiding-and-seeking Shakti and Shakti hiding-and-seeking Shiva.

 

Chapter 1 Intro, Page 6

The reader should be forewarned that this theory is devoutly idealist in its orientation. Everything begins and ends in the mental state of the viewer, including the world the viewer perceives. The problem is to explain how the physical world induces the brain to produce a mental representation that is such a good copy.

… … … I don’t intend to be uncharitable toward Brown (I find much beauty in his work), but I experience this last statement to be so reductionistic that it’s difficult for me to feel inspired to read much further (even as I can play Devil’s advocate – see Faust quote referenced earlier – and find several inspiring reasons).

The thing is…as far as I can tell from skimming the chapters and reading interviews with Brown…I already basically know this stuff from my years of exposure to the literature on the neurobiology of developmental trauma, consciousness studies, William James, Whitehead, etc, and, more especially, through my own lived and living Question and direct experiencing. Do I have it all down in its minutia? No. Is there probably plenty of stuff I don’t get exactly right? Yes. Is this level of technical mastery something I’m particularly interested in? No.

The claim can be made that Brown’s work is “true but partial.” My contention is that, yes, and it is (in my estimation) reductionistic. To me, reductionism refers to a position that is not merely partial (as are all positions), but rather to a position that bears the marks of ontological alienation (even as this alienation “presences” intimacy, as light and shadow, clarity and confusion, the deific and the demonic, etc are always already salvifically interpenetrating and co-potentiating as transitivity of relation-and-self-relation).  This is to say that though the “light” in Brown’s work is not lost on me, I believe this light is not in self-transparent relationship with its “shadow.” This is also to say that I perceive positions of the sort Brown seems to be to be taking as inherently ontologically alienating and subtly violent and to too easily lend themselves to the pathologizing of b/Being(s) in pain and the mystery and sanctity of Suffering.

What I am experiencing (perhaps through a misguided reading of Brown’s work) as the reduction of the Human Being to the brain and body is deeply troubling to me. The self (including the much maligned ego) cannot be properly understood as a by-product of the body and brain. The body is a living, biological language(ing) of Being. Modern science, however, is both literate and illiterate. Literate because it takes its own verbal concepts literally, its own theoretical models and representations of reality as reality. It is illiterate because the modern scientist has no inkling of what it means to read the book of nature, to truly understand natural phenomena and processes as language(ing). If it does presume to understand this language (as in referrals to “genetic texts” and “cellular communications”), it is only as an autonomous sign system devoid of any semantic dimension, which is to say absent of any Meaning (and there are ways of understanding meaning that are not reducible to mere “artifacts” of the cognitive occasion/subject).

I do not understand the brain as I infer Brown does. With Heidegger, I assert that, ”The essential realm in which biology moves can never be grounded in biology as a science. We cannot say that the organ has capacities, but must say that the capacity has organs. We hear, not the ear. …Whomever insists on a biological explanation without first of all bringing to light the essence of what needs to be explained is like a man who wishes to reach a goal without having previously brought the goal itself into view… What good is all explaining if what has to be explained remains unclear? Or does one indeed hold the mistaken view that what is unclarified in itself could ever be clarified by a [biological] explanation. …How does one measure grief? Obviously we cannot measure it at all. Why not? Were we to apply a method of measurement to grief, this would go against the meaning of grief and we would rule out in advance the grief as grief. One cannot measure tears; rather when one measure one measures at best a fluid and its drops but not tears….To what do tears belong? Are they something somatic or something psychic? Neither one nor the other.”

For those who are living and lived by the Question to which Brown’s work is a pregnant Response, I honor the integrity and dignity of the engagement. But this is not my Question. This is not the particular “Devil” I am called to serve. This doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t continue to read SEM and participate in our learning cohort, but it means that my own lived and living Questions will be sweetly ripening in a field perfumed with the fragrant heat of dissonance and discontent and dissatisfaction.

If somebody can perhaps make com/passionate contact with my Question and the Care (Ultimate Concern) it seeks to incarnate such that I might be more reconciled to my engagement with Brown (whom I intend no disrespect toward, though possibly I have been unwittingly disrespectful and even violent with a legion of unfounded and perhaps arrogant assumptions), I would invite and welcome your enjoinment.

Last, I wonder what Jason Brown would make of this. It has long been with me, and I with it:


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Brandy – JB: Preface – Pages 30 to 45

Page 31

Yet the dilemma raised the question of whether I should reject my theory were it to be disconfirmed?

Indeed, what counts for us as “authority,” and more importantly, why, especially as relates to the w/Wound-driven, hidden-but-daily-Dramatized core assumptions that are institutionalized in/as our felt sense of psychic coherence and integrity?

Page 31

…the negation of his scientific claims was the beginnings of his science. …Fortunately, I [Jason Brown] have not yet had to confront this possibility.

Chant Kali Kali. =D Death is not the enemy of Life, but its Lover. And, to Jason Brown, I ask, “Merely ‘fortunate?’” (I tend to see this lack of confrontation as equally unfortunate).

Page 32

Science is a driving force of philosophical analysis but it burdens the philosophical enterprise by limited analysis to what is conceivable within the confines of the sciences.

In a related vein, reminds me of Habermas saying, “Positivism certainly still expresses a philosophical position w/regard to science, for the scientistic self-understanding of the sciences that it articulates does not coincide with science itself. But by making a dogma of the sciences’ belief in themselves, positivism assumes the prohibitive function of protecting scientific inquiry from epistemological self-reflection. Positivism is philosophical only insofar as is necessary for the immunization of the sciences against philosophy.”

Page 42

Since causation depends on the mind, the mind is not explained by the invocation of causal mechanisms. The past is not a link in a chain of causation but implicit in every occurrence.

Trying to explain the mind by invocation of causal mechanisms is like trying to explain that the phenomenon of dreaming is caused by dream events or dream figures. The present is not an abstract “now” which separates  an unchanging given and “actual” past from an open, ungiven and “potential” future, but rather is the very process of “being-given” and thus something which is neither given and fixed nor not given and abstract.

Page 42

The objects of the present are past before we see them.

Even though I recognize this as totally legitimate within its scope of delimitation, it also strikes me (perhaps ignorantly) as doing a sort of disservice in suggesting too sharp a demarcation between “past” and “present” (even as the author is referring formally I believe to the “specious present”), and too narrow a  definition of “seeing,” for if we cannot in some fashion “see” these *objects* (granted, they appear as “objects” only in/as the act of seeing them,  and in/as this seeing we ourselves are changed), how could we possibly assert they are “past” before we see them, and do we not always already apprehend this “past” in and as the “present”? Looks like lots of interesting stuff here with a sort of “quantum entanglement” of see-ing and be-ing and time.

Page 42

In the perishing of what is actual for the next cycle of becoming, we perceive the kernel of our own death and, even, the possibility of rebirth.

Maybe we could play with pointing and say that “death” is something that will happen to you; “dying” is something that is happening to you, not in terms of “getting closer” to something that is “in” your “future,” but in terms of the constant “flickering” between being and non-being that is the creative and transitive “re-con-figuring” of what we take to be ourselves. (And how funny, I read into Brown’s next paragraph and he basically says this, albeit much more eloquently. And oh, now I’ve reached the next page and he’s talking about “rapidly alternating lights,” i.e., “flickering” – how fun!)

Okay, I am deliriously tired and quasi incoherent and am now going to perform my nighttime NHR (Nazi Hygiene Ritual) and put myself to bed. Zzzzzzzzzzz… =)

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Brandy – JB: Preface through Page 30

Hey, all. To hell with the page numbers and weird formatting. My Macbook is demonically possessed and it’s all I can do to get this much up before I take it to the Genius Bar for exorcism.

The point is that things are not simply there, they arise, and this arising, this momentary life of the thing, is hidden in its phenomenal surface. A thread of relatedness binds the thing to its source, as it binds all things to each other.

The veil that conceals and reveals. “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” -Romans 8: 38, 39

Unity is not divided; it is allocated to “lesser unities” that undergo further allocation.

Allocated” doesn’t feel quite resonant to me. Off the cuff, I might have it read, “Unity is not division but distinction; it is self-sacrifice/d to/as “lesser unities” that under go further sacrifice (literally, “to make [more] ‘wholly’/'holy’” without addition).

In some ways, negation is the core microgenesis in that constraints on form determine the resultants so that entities are defined by what they cannot become rather that what they are caused to be.

Ah, via negativa, the radical humility of the apophatic God. Maybe more poetic justice can be done to this later since Brown will surely return to it. For now, I will just riff by amen-ing that a constraint isn’t merely a negative principle but a positive one in that it brings a being into existence out of Being because it affords a frontier between the entity and its breach with not being what it is. The constraint draws the boundary and frontier against non-being, thereby allowing a being to come to stand according to its internal particularity.

A symptom was a “normal” but preliminary phase in a process ordinarily concealed within the final product.

“Symptoms” are never merely “pathological” in the way we typically mistake them to be. They always signify some sort of processural (“Life forward”) “arrest,” even as this arrest is processurally announced. The “dynamic freezing” and “frozen dynamic” of a symptom serve to “presence” the apparent past in a way that makes it *enduringly* available to continually “present” itself for care (used in the Heideggerian sense) such that it may re-turn to itself in an act of self-reflexive Intimacy.

“Even it it’s true, I don’t believe it.” What could he say? “I won the Nobel for the wrong theory?”

Are we courageous enough to be rightly wrong, to make our own sacred mistakes that might usher in a new order?  Have we not all won, are we not all winning in our own way, the Nobel for the wrong theory? Indeed, what would WE say? What ARE we saying? And what is this nakedness that longs to be clothed? Perhaps because we refuse to clothe this nakedness we must all go about in the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps it is this recognition that might mark the end of our pathologizing and the beginning of compassion.