Larval Subjects .

My take on Freud is that it is the clinic and speech of the patient that is most important. For good psychoanalysis, the speech of the patient or analysand is sacred. The motto is “say anything”, let the speech go where it will. Listen! It is a wild and aleatory space that is anxious for analyst and analysand alike. Each new case should carry the promise of completely reforming all of psychoanalysis. The theory is brilliant despite its many warts, but at the end of the day that theory is always an attempt— always inadequate —to make some sense of the endlessly surprising event of speech that happens in the clinic. Above all Freud was drawn to the detritus of our speech, all those things we dismiss as meaningless and without significance. For it is there in the symptom and the parapraxes that something of our being is brought forth.

As I said in my post on Platonic dialectic, everything begins with an encounter. Encounters occur in a space of immanence. The Real erupts in the …

Plato and Transcendental Argument

In this series of posts I’m trying to proceed as naively as possible, refusing philosophical questions, and just describing things as they appear. The key examples in an earlier post is that the earth appears to be still and that the sun and moon appear to rise and set such that we’re stationary and at the center of things. Of course, we now know this is just an appearance and that the earth is actually spinning and that it’s a sort of an illusion of perspective. We distinguish between the appearance and the reality. I’m beginning with this naive realism that temporarily suspends the appearance/reality distinction for methodological reasons to capture salient features— especially surrounding value —that are difficult to derive in the philosophical attitude and that I think tend to get overlooked. I want to treat value in all its forms as realities of our experience that pervade every aspect of the world we navigate. Hence the thesis that the world shines with values. The philosophical question then becomes that of why some people see them and others do not? Why are some of us blind to them in the way that some people are color blind? Is it that they values are just subjective or is there something else going on? With that question we enter the philosophical attitude that distinguishes appearance and reality. Take the example of genocide. How can people do this to others. Is it that the worth and dignity of persons is just subjective, social constructs? I’m not so sure. Why? Because the same people who do these horrific things to others treat other people as ends in themselves in other aspects of their lives. They see the shine of value dimly and inconsistently. This suggests to me that these atrocities come from elsewhere, requiring extensive rhetorical conditioning to lead us to see the persecuted group as worthless and to be destroyed. To get to that thesis, however, I need to begin with the pre-philosophical experience of value to see how it actually shines in experience before we begin to philosophically reflect.

The central thesis of wilderness ontology is that the wilderness is all there is. In beginning from the premise that the wilderness is all there is it is necessary to practice the distinction between the signifier and the signified. When we hear the signifier “wilderness” the signified we think of is that of undomesticated lands outside of civilization. We think of phusis or that which grows and blooms out of itself if it’s own accord, untouched by human techne. This signified, however, must be refused. It is precisely this association, this signified, that is foreclosed by the thesis that the wilderness is all there is. To say “all” is to say “without exception”. This is precisely the point of wilderness ontology: it aims to trace a plane of immanence, to think Spinozist substance (but turning about the modes as Deleuze proposed), in a manner that unsettles and complicates our unconscious but always operative distinctions between nature and culture, form and matter, mind and body, and all the rest. Henceforth, the wilderness will no longer be a place you go to or visit because if the wilderness is all there is you are always already there. As I sit here writing this on my couch in the living room I am no less in the wilderness than when I am in the rain forests of Costa Rica. If I abuse and pervert language in this way in the name of forging a concept and deducing the concepts that it calls forth, then this is because I believe the Anthropocene is the horizon of all thought today, that it is that which calls us to think today, and the nature/culture distinction that forms the philosophical unconscious of Western thought since it’s beginning— that informs every discipline and our entire system of values —is a hindrance and obstacle to thinking the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene we discover the Planetary, our withness and amongness with being. Such distinctions are no longer tenable.

The wasteland is the complement to the wilderness. The wasteland is both a lived reality embodied in floating islands of garbage in our oceans, 145°F temperatures detected by satellites this last week in India, mass extinctions, and endless climate related natural disasters, but also a way of thinking in which everything is reduced to instrumental or means/ends rationality. In the wasteland everything is reduced to a use and the only telos is profit. There is a twilight of absolute values, those things that are valuable for their own sake and nothing else, in the wasteland. These absolute values are that for the sake of which we live, yet they dim and grow faint. Beauty, friendship, love, health, knowledge for the sake of satisfying our curiosity and not for the sake of profit or new technologies…. In the wasteland all of these values or attractors take flight such that we can scarcely discern them and think people are sentimental fools when they speak of them. The wasteland is what we must escape even if it increasingly overwhelms us in an absolute desert.

Everything always begins with an encounter. A crisis of life or thought. A son is rotten while his father is good. Would it be just to escape from prison when I’ve been unjustly found guilty? Another son is accusing his father of impiety. There’s always an encounter, a question. And make no mistake, these encounters happen by chance. They are genuine events that surge up within the regularity and routine of life, problematizing it and calling our commonplaces into question. Perhaps this, then, is the first lesson of Platonic philosophy: there are no “questions or problems of philosophy” if by that one means eternal and abiding questions to which philosophers might propose differing solutions and then debate amongst themselves. There is no, for example, question “what is knowledge in general?”, but rather only ever questions like what is knowledge in archaeology, or physics, or engineering, or football, etc., and it is always a crisis with something that doesn’t fit that precipitates this question. True and genuine philosophy always begins with an encounter and is therefore fragmentary for this reason. System builders dream of an end to encounters. They dream of banishing the real and its return.

What Plato says of the dialectic is mysterious. We rise, he says, from the cases in the world to a principle. Then we descend back to the world. We look among different instances of justice that we think we’ve encountered— justice in the classroom, in the workplace, at the vending machine, with taxes, in the courtroom, etc —and then we make what Peirce called an abduction, extracting a double of these particulars, a general formula. For example, what is common to these instances of justice that are so very different? What is the formula— f(x) = 3x + 5 —that is their common pattern? Perhaps we infer that justice is fairness. That will be the form (I realize this isn’t Plato’s answer in The Republic). Getting the grade one earned based on the quality of work done, a reasonable price on a drink from the vending machine, a fair wage for work, a sentence proportional to the crime, etc. These things are all so very different, yet they have a common pattern.

We ascend into the heights of abstraction and now, from abstraction, we descend back to the world with transformed vision. In the Allegory Socrates talks about how the prisoner who returns from the outside world can now scarcely see. Rather, she sees differently. Having grasped the form-ula we now see with an eye towards what calls or beckons us to fairness. Are there things we have missed that pertain to justice or fairness? Are their imperatives that we didn’t before see or discern? But also, are there things we before thought were fair or just that turn out to be unjust? Perhaps we advocated the fair tax. Superficially it might seem fair and just to tax everyone at exactly the same percentage rate. But then I notice that Walmart makes far more use of the highways and military (to maintain safe shipping routes) than I do. Shouldn’t they pay an amount proportional to the use they make of public services? Gradually, in our descent the world becomes re-ordered and re-thought as we submit it to the test of the form-ula, transforming our vision or practice. We need not believe in the reality of forms to be Platonists. We need only believe in the power of thought to transform our vision or practice through the formation of concepts. Being a disciple of a philosopher never means bowing before the letter of their text— that’s a scholar, not a philosopher —but rather means being inspired by a vector and intensity in their thought, a spirit, that you vary, mutate, and carry on like dancing sparks across time on a Jacob’s ladder.

I remain in the pre-philosophical attitude. The aim here is the resist the urge to theorize, to explain, to cite, but just take note of experience. As a result, I’m doing a poor version of phenomenology. That must be bracketed as well. This is doomed to failure as theorization and what one has read will always creep in, but I must try. The aim is to note those features of experience— not my experience yet, just experience —that are salient and that will perhaps become grounds for a transition to the philosophical attitude. I am seeking after the grounds of questions worth asking. I am not seeking answers from others or their theories.

The world shines with value and imperatives. It beckons to me, calling me to behave towards the things of the world in appropriate ways. I experience their value as in the things themselves. I do not experience them as coming from me. It is the thing itself that calls for regard. I will not ask whether the values come from me or are in the things themselves, nor will I wonder how they might be grounded or defended or address the specter of relativism. It is enough, in the pre-philosophical attitude, in the world of appearances that the values present them as out there in the world, as real, as there in the things in themselves.

The world first presents itself as split or divided between that which is of value and that which is not of value. These values are not economic, nor are they prices. Perhaps it would be better to say that the world presents itself as that which is indifferent and that which shines with import. It is difficult to describe the indifferent because it goes unnoticed. It falls into the background and does not call to us to attend to it.

The values are not homogenous or of one kind, but manifest themselves in different ways and to different degrees. The dead crow I found in my yard the other day is an occasion of sadness as a magnificent bird is gone, but also signs with a sense of menace, danger, and disgust. It calls for me to behave appropriately towards it both out of respect for it even though it will never know, and to protect myself from potential disease or sickness. It is a fallen being in its passage from the living to the dead.

The mess on my patio cooking table shines with a sense of irresponsibility on my part. It issues an imperative for me to clean it, one that will not cease making these demands to me until I restore it to the state in which it ought to be. Our dog is an end in herself, an absolute. She is not a tool to be used to pull a sled or guard us or for entertainment– at least not in the sense that we play a game for entertainment or watch television –but is her own purpose and valued for her sake. Even when she is irritating as she was last night when, terrified by the rain storm, she climbed all over our heads in bed seeking comfort, there is a demand that we attend to her and comfort her. This demand does not issue from her even as she makes it, but rather is just what is right. A feeling of anger and rage comes over me as I hear the dogs a few houses over crying and barking, chained in the back yard away from their people in the rain or on a bitterly cold night. This is no way to treat a dog. It is a violation of their dignity, an abuse.

There are those places and things that are sacred and that call to be treated with reverence. I know of no other word for it. These places and things call for us to behave in certain ways and to attend to them in certain ways. One does not laugh or speak in a loud voice when they visit Auschwitz. You do not take selfies of yourself in this place. It is a sacred place that demands reverence. It shines with an aura of what happened there. Likewise, in Svaerholt, you not throw garbage on the ground of this wilderness and in the midst of these ruins, even if all sorts of flotsam blows in and washes up on the shores. This place is to be treated with care and reverence. Similarly you do not carve your initials in Stonehenge or belch loudly in a temple or church even if you’re an atheist.

Others call to us in all sorts of ways as well. As you walk through a doorway you don’t simply let a door slam shut if someone else is behind you. You hold it open as you enter so that they might enter too. This is a recognition and acknowledgement of their personhood and there are millions of tiny gestures like this. The beautiful demands that it be attended to, that it be sheltered and protected. It is a sacrilege to removed the mountaintop to mine or to cut down the redwood trees because of their beauty and singularity. The stone formations in Goblin National Park call for us to protect them and we hiss when we see others push them over because they are unique, beautiful, exist only in this place, and took thousands of years to form.

Everywhere the world is pervaded by value and shines with value and these values are what structure our action and comportment towards them. They are the teloi and the ends of our action, that for the sake of which we act, and are the ultimate meanings in our lives. They are that which make life worth living and are that for the sake of which we do everything else.