The New Leviathan

I have resolved to read Collingwood's The New Leviathan, Or, Man, Society, Civilization, And Barbarism.

I was trying to read War and Peace but it turns out I'm too much of an amateur (sorry J-dawg).

But frankly I'm delighted at the idea of tackling a big awesome philosophy book. Especially one by Collingwood. And especially one so relevant to my current interests. Politics, culture, war, minds, so on. Collingwood is all up on all of that shit.

Can't wait to sink my teeth into it.

Dead Musicians

I was just listening to a song.

"Thorns In Roses" by The Exploding Hearts.

Then I remembered how three out of four band members died in a car accident in 2003.

God dammit. Sometimes people just die. Terrible things happen and lives disappear. These people were younger than me. 23, 21, and 20. Thrown from cars. Bodies torn apart. Destroyed.

Someone fell asleep at the wheel. Three out of five people in the car died. How would it feel to be those other two? Horrifying. No doubt. But a relief. A horrible, guilt ridden relief.

I am simultaneously thankful and horrified to live in a country that keeps my exposure to real violence at a minimum. I am, however, simply horrified at my exposure to simulated violence.

Once I was in a huge arcade. Gameworks in downtown Seattle. I was drinking and playing games with friends. The entire night was strange to me. Then I said to my friend 'I'm standing in a room full of people who are all pretending to kill something'.

It scares the shit out of me.

I looked around the room and 3/4 of the games were about using a fake gun to shoot a fake person/monster/thing.

Football, video games, television. It is all loaded with simulated violence.

It's like when I went to a football game. UMD versus Berkeley. They fire fake cannons at half time. Pyrotechnics and simulated violence.

All this glorification of war, this simulation of violence and death.

I am so terrified of becoming desensitized to violence. I don't want to see war. I don't want to see death.

But at the same time, a part of me, an irresponsible and naive part of me, wants to see it. I want to understand that life is indeed nasty, brutish, and short. This world is loaded with violence. All these poor babies. All these poor bodies. All those destroyed lives.

God damn this American 'spectator sport militarism'.

Damn all this simulated violence.

I don't want people to die brutal deaths. But people do. And all I can do is think about it. I've never experienced it. I've never seen it. How terrible. These gapes in my empathic palette. I'll never really understand those others. But I'll try.

This is no attempt to give up on those dealing with violent worlds. Merely a lamentation at my own exposure to violence. Merely an expression of the frustration with American culture's careless representation of violence and death.

What a careless nation we are. What an attitude we have. I don't have any sense of war. No sense of violence. What a bubble I fear this country is.

Collingwood

When I think about R.G. Collingwood I don't know where to begin.

I learned about him because of his contributions to the philosophy of history. The Idea Of History is probably what he is most well known for. No doubt about it, Collingwood was deeply committed to the philosophy of history, and believed that historical study was the only way humans could ever understand themselves. Without self knowledge, Collingwood believed, there was no hope for human beings to rationally create their own historical existence. In other words, you won't make the best choices unless you know yourself, where you come from, your history.

But there is so much more happening in Collingwood's thinking than his historical study. My professor once told me that Collingwood thought in broad strokes. Because when I read Collingwood philosophical categorization seems highly inappropriate. I don't know how to generalize Collingwood's work yet. Interesting that I say yet. I basically have ambition of breaking into his mind. Figuring out what the heck was up with this man that died before he was ever able to really tell me what he was up to. This man who died before he finished the book that, for 25 years, thought would be his 'chief work'.

How interesting to try and grapple with an intense mind that died before it told all it wanted to tell. How to 'reenact' that mind. How to simulate those thoughts.

I often think about Zizek's discussion of the virtual of an author in In Defense Of Lost Causes. He talks about how to really stay true to an author's thought, you have to betray that author. By which he means that at the core of any writing, there are always thoughts and implications beyond what the text is able to communicate. If you want to really be with an author in his thinking, engage fully with his questions, then you need to go beyond that author. But I'm confusing myself pretty badly with those three lines. The virtual, a Deluzian concept I am not familiar enough with.

Collingwood makes me think about the virtual of an author. The mind at the core of the writing. Because if one is to really understand Collingwood one has to understand the mind behind the text. Obviously. Studying the texts isn't enough. I need a deeper understanding of Collingwood than that.

Anyways, I just wanted to talk about Collingwood a little.

How much he confuses me.

He developed his own philosophies of mind, language, history, causation, law and politics, so much stuff.

Confusing.

Implosive Rationality And Politics

In May I came up with the phrase 'implosive rationality'. With that phrase I am talking about the paradoxical use of reason. I think reason is most valuable when it is used to improve non-rational or intuitive behavior. Reason, if used properly, ceases to exist in its own right. Instead, it implodes on itself, destroys itself, and leaves a positive habit in its wake.

I think this conception of rationality has some political implications.

Mainly because civilization and society are non-rational processes that a community engages in. We are all living in relation to the social structures that we know, engaging with them more or less habitually. The business of civilization (going to work, loving people, having relationships of all kinds) is accomplished habitually. This is why Alfred Whited said: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism... that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extended the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them." Civilization advances by expanding the unconscious repertoire, by creating new habits for people.

Politics, however, is a rational process. In politics people think, they make decisions, write things, all with the hope of making society better. But civilization is inherently a non-rational process. Politics must therefore be a form of implosive rationality. Ideally, at least.

Is it thus fair to call government and politics the institutionalization of habit? The purposeful creation of institutions that will habituate people in certain ways. About the creation of mediums that will provide a society with a certain set of habits.

Maybe. There is something about society and habit. There is something about implosive rationality and the creation of habits. There is something about politics and reason.

There must be something about politics and implosive rationality. Something about government and the creation of habits.

What I'm talking about is government and the purposeful creation of minds. Trying to create people by creating the institutions they work through.

I really don't know what else to say about this stuff.

Reason is such a strange thing. How to properly use it when most of life is so antithetical to it? Because it must be used. The rationalization of politics might be a good thing. But the rationalization of life and society is impossible and probably not good.

Because I don't think the rational life is possible. Life must be habitual. Life must be intuitive. Life cannot be an endless rational process. It will always be marked by spits of rationality. Rationality has a place in it. But it is not the central thing. Habit is.

Modern Zen As The Synthesis Of Micro And Macro Perspectives

I was thinking the other night about this whole idea of 'modern zen' that I've been reading, thinking, and writing about. I had a conversation with a friend about it. About how I was assaulting this image of someone who seeks wisdom or enlightenment solely from within their own mind. But of course that can be done. There are all kinds of people living who are able to be peaceful, mindful, calm, happy, all just by engaging with their own minds. Lots of people are able to achieve mindfulness through the phenomenal mind alone.

But what I'm advocating as 'modern zen' is different than at. And I think it is probably has a lot more to do with me than anything else.

What I mean by modern zen is a synthesis of historical ontological philosophy with the personal goals of zen. Historical ontology studies the nature of our being and experience through historical methods. We recognize that much of our experience is symbolically constituted, that we have our experiences because we have labels to identify ourselves and others with. If our being and experience is symbolically constituted, then this means that self-knowledge, in some ways, must be historical knowledge.

Modern zen, for me, is an attempt to achieve mindfulness through the historical ontological interrogation of the categories that structure our experience. It means studying the history of gender and sexuality, of war and nationalism, or economic systems and political ideologies. It means the historically contingency of our thoughts and feelings may prevent us from knowing their origins. It means achieving an zen like mental state from an intellectually rigorous point of view.

I partied the other night. As I was walking around I started thinking about the phrase 'the synthesis of micro and macro perspectives'. Because this is really a question about that. The mind is the most micro perspective that I can think of. It is the bedrock of all other perspectives. Then we move outward to other, more macro perspectives. One of them being the historical perspective, another being the cosmic perspective. We can assume these different perspectives on our own lives.

I don't know if there are other perspectives beyond these three that I could distinguish. Would it be even more 'micro' to look at single celled organisms? For some reason that seems like it is macro... But I'm confusing myself. I can't think about that right now.

What I will say is that I am interested in obtaining a point of view that has managed to synthesize my micro perspective with more macro perspectives. Namely, I want to synthesize an historical perspective into my phenomenal mind. This is the synthesis of micro and micro that I am most concerned with these days. Because this notion of modern zen, in essence, is about a synthesis of historical knowledge into the phenomenal mind. It is about synthesizing a historical knowledge of symbols into my own perspective, with the goal of reducing the way that those symbols structure my experience. Studying the history of gender, for example, so that I will be less dominated by the idea that I need to be aggressive, or pay for girls, or talk to them in certain ways.

So there appears to be a trace of transcendentalism in this idea of modern zen. I don't know much about this word. And there was something about Husserl and transcendental consciousness or something. But it seems like an implication of this idea of modern zen that I am learning about the history of symbols so as to transcend their effect on me. Seems like a pretty obvious implication of what I'm saying.

I don't know if that is the case, though. In practice, transcending a symbolic order is pretty difficult, as I reflected on recently. So, if its goals are not transcendental, what then, is the task of modern zen?

This is a moment where I wish I understood zen more. Does zen contain any trace of transcendentalism? Does it in anyway advocate this type of thinking? My gut reaction is not, it does not. Instead, it would encourage me to directly engage with that reality. Not to try and overcome it through an act or transcendence or withdrawal, but to face it. To show it down straight up.

This to me seems like the right attitude or goal for modern zen to set for itself. Not one of transcendence, but one of intelligent engagement. I learn about the symbolic rules governing my experience not so as to escape them entirely. But so as to understand them, to apprehend them, and to navigate them. To synthesize that historical knowledge into an acting phenomenal mind.

And this is more of a one way street than a two way street. The phenomenal mind, the micro mind, is synthesizing the macro perspectives, and not the other way around. This is about the phenomenal mind enriching itself through imagined larger perspectives.

Hmmmm, this is the phenomenal mind synthesizing experience so as to enrich its own experience.

Modern zen, it appears, is a zen that is achieved or augmented through synthetic experience.

This is all very new to me. These conclusions, this relationship between synthetic experience and modern zen. But I guess it makes sense. If historical study is inherently about synthetic experience, which Collingwood implies it is, then there must be some relationship between historical ontology and synthetic experience, and thus a connection between modern zen and synthetic experience.

Hmmm. This notion of modern zen has a lot of development left in it. I need to work on it more. I need to read more zen. Need to continue to think about historical ontology. Need to continue to think about the political implications of these ideas, of the idea of self-creation that is necessarily bound up with it all. I need to take account of the role of synthetic experience.

This is all in progress.

There is a third perspective I'll touch on briefly: the cosmic.

Lately I've been watching a lot of shows on the origin of the universe. Really intense and strange stuff.

Narrators say shit like "understanding how something could emerge from nothing means understanding the nature of the universe, and the nature of ourselves."

Scientists consistently assert that to understand ourselves we have to understand the nature of the universe. That understanding the big bang means understanding our place in the universe.

This doesn't sit quite right with me, though.

It was like when I watched a show on parallel universes and the big bang and I was so outraged that they kept referring to it as 'a theory of everything'.

But what about the social and historical worlds? That theory of the universe would leave that domain completely untouched. This type of cosmic, pre-historical knowledge would be valuable until we crossed the threshold into history: into the time when language begins to structure reality more than nature and instinct. And perhaps language is just another instinct. Which I have no problem with, and why Searle's chapter in Making The Social World 'Language As Biological And Social' is invaluable to me.

But what I'm railing against right now is what I perceive as a false claim to self-knowledge. I don't think these physicists know what they are talking about when they say that understanding the universe is about understanding ourselves. Because I can't imagine what type of useful knowledge would come out of that discovery. How would that fact leave the social world changed in any way? What types of decisions would be encouraged from that revelation?

I don't know. But my hunch is that self-knowledge must be historical knowledge. That is the more effective way of knowing ourselves, and also an ignored mode of knowing. People don't think of history as a source of self-knowledge. But I do.

But anyways, the point of this post is to deal with the idea of synthesizing macro and micro perspectives. At the core of modern zen is the attempt to synthesize historical knowledge of symbolic order into the phenomenal mind. This implies that modern zen is fundamentally about augmenting phenomenal experience with synthetic experience.

The cosmic perspective, however, I still don't know what to do with.

The question is this: What macro perspectives can be usefully synthesized/incorporated into my phenomenal mind? What macro perspectives will best inform my micro perspectives?

Questions questions question!

I highly recommend Collingwood's An Essay On Metaphysics. I can't wait to really do some serious writing on it, because I suspect it is a gold mine for these ideas. I know it is.

It is like The Order Of Things but better.

Modern Zen

Sometimes when I meet new people I think about ways in which I would explain my most substantial interests to them.

I've been starting new jobs so I've been meeting new people and imagining how I would explain my interest in philosophy to them. What are my interests within philosophy? What precisely have I written about and hope to write about?

This is an interesting exercise because it challenges me to clarify my own interests.

And it occurred to me today that one of the things I'm most interested in, perhaps the thing I'm most interested in, is finding a way to live a zen life in this contemporary moment.

This is why this post is titled 'Modern Zen'.

I'm using the word modern in the way that Foucault defines it in his essay 'What Is Enlightenment': As an historical attitude. Modernity as an attitude that asks, "What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?" (The Politics Of Truth, 99). Or, put another way, Modernity as "a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos" (Ibid., 105).

What, then, would 'modern zen' be by this definition?

It would be an attempt to enact the basic goals of a zen life (mindfulness, accurate perception of reality, unfaltering acceptance of things) in the context of contemporary reality.

What then is contemporary reality? Contemporary reality, for one thing, is symbolically dense.

So the question, which I have addressed in several recent posts, is how to be mindful in a world that is incredibly symbolically dense, and therefore historically constituted, historistic, if you will (what a stupid word, but one that fits).

Modern zen is thus a perspective that capitalizes on historical and intellectual modes of thought to achieve an accurate perception of reality.

The symbolic density of the present moment means that it cannot be perceived accurately without a historical perspective. Maybe I am wrong. I would like to meet someone who has achieved a sort of mindfulness without historical knowledge.

But I for one grew up saturated in the American symbolic world. I have often felt dominated by the symbolic order of the here and now. And I need a history of that symbolic order if I am to feel like I am aware of it.

Thus the phrase 'modern zen'.

Another thing I have been concerned with, and this is perhaps what I am really concerned with, is the political implications of this outlook.

My background in military history made it obvious that zen thinking had implications for political thinking and decision making. And thinkers like Collingwood, Foucault, Claxton, and definitely John Gray, have made me believe that modes of thought found in zen could have benefits for our current cultural and political situation.

Ooooooh.

What I seek is to live well, to live an expressive (aesthetic) life, to life a mindful (zen) life, and to translate that mode of living and thinking into a politically relevant project. And I hope that all of those can be the same thing. That the aesthetic life is the zen life, and that the zen/aesthetic life can also be the political life.

Why else would I work for more than a year on a writing project titled 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection'?

"I'm Fine, Thanks"

Are you?

I am. But I might not be.

I'm still wrapped up in the issue of symbolic order and the way it effects my relationships. I want to talk to people. Yet I find that I can only speak to people in certain situations.

I can't speak to people at bus stops. That is an uncomfortable symbolic space for all of us, one that doesn't support conversation.

But at my jobs, in an economic symbolic space, it is very easy to make small talk, to have fun banter. There is a definite symbolic space that supports small talk. But only until that definite symbolic space has been achieved can we engage in these supposedly superfluous interactions.

Ohhhh. I'm too tired to write about this right now.

But there are a few things I'd like to return to.

One is the issue of 'regard'. How we implicitly give someone a degree of humanity through our interactions. We can treat a cashier as a mere cashier, or we can recognize them as a real ass person who is merely working in an attempt to sustain the rest of their life.

The other is the issue of gender in symbolic space. Because if I'm at a bus stop and I talk to a girl I feel like she will immediately be worried about whether I'm hitting on her or not. So, because the symbolic order of the bus stop is so uncertain, we immediately defer to another symbolic order, that of gender and sexuality.

I won't change the title of this post.

When I first began this post I had all kinds of ideas about people who come in to my stores. I say hey how are you. They say "I'm fine, thanks." I want them to say more. I want them to ask me how I am. Because I might break the script. I might tell them I'm great or terrible or confused or the worst or the best or beautiful or furious. I might just break the fucking script.

But the answer "I'm fine, thanks" caps off the script. There is no going further, they might as well say. This is it. We have engaged in our economically defined script. This is it, though.

Symbolic order, mindfulness, conversation, expression, spontaneity. Buzz words? Maybe.

Shit I'm serious about? Definitely.

Is there a metaphor beyond explosiveness? One appropriate for this moment?

Probably not.

My emotions are volatile. And I'm excited to be interrogating my relationship to symbolic orders.

And interestingly, unfortunately, I keep returning to economic symbolic order.

Work structures my life.