ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Facebook, Anger, and Attending to the Beauty of God's Presence

Facebook, along with the rest of the internet, is full of angry thoughts, lies, deceptions, things to distract us and corrupt our spirits. This is what holy scripture calls 'the world,' and it has ever been this way. I for one do not think it is qualitatively different from the various demons that have assaulted human beings from time immemorial.

And if there are demons here, there are also opportunities for us to practice discipline in this wilderness, the same way Jesus did in his wilderness temptations. We do it by practicing faithful attentiveness to the beauty of God's presence with us in the wilderness. On facebook it means we can post things that sustain us, give us joy, and provide meaning. We can practice the hope that comes from letting anger alone and turning to compassion. We seek to absorb God's loving attention for us so that our faces may shine with the light of love in this troubled world.

Zuckerberg et al. may not have meant it for such, but I believe that showing our faces to one another is a holy opportunity. One that requires relentless honesty and self-scrutiny that we are not using it to posture, signal our own virtues, or seek attention for our ego needs. God wants our faces to shine with humble glory, weakness made strong in divine love. Why not use this medium to make the attempt? Our teeth may be crooked or our faces wrinkled, just as our spirits may be bowed with the heavy weight of sin, struggle, or failure that each of us carry. It is okay to show that as well. The devil hates it when we admit our need, but God is glorified all the more.

As long as Christ and the Holy Spirit are in the world, this is where we must be as well, seeking to shine and let it shine.

Thinking about the phenomenology, psychology, and philosophy of addiction

In sharing my transdisciplinary bibliography on “addiction” with a Facebook group devoted to psychoanalytic psychology, I wrote the following by way of “an introduction or perhaps provocation.” Immediately below, I repeat in the first paragraph material from the original introduction to the bibliography which, as you’ll see, was stated rather abstractly and summarily:

More than a few titles are not about addiction qua addiction, but deal with subject matter pertaining to the psychological, ethical and cultural questions that surround addiction as self-destructive behavior in the context of variables, causes, and consequences that are, we might say, at once individual or intrapersonal and interpersonal (in an intimate sense) and social. Yet the distinctions serve a purpose, as they are essential in addressing the specific dynamics and dialectics of interaction between these two dimensions or poles so as to better understand the nature of addiction in the contemporary world. 

For what it’s worth, I’ll cite five volumes I’ve found particularly sophisticated, philosophically and psychologically speaking. In other words, these volumes contain or suggest arguments that are, by my lights, both sound and persuasive: Elster (1999), Fingarette (1988), Heyman (2009), Poland and Graham, eds. (2011), and Radoilska (2013). Together, they suggest—in varying degrees or ways—a model of addictive behavior (especially with regard to alcohol and drugs) which (i) rejects the “brain disease” or simply disease explanatory account of addiction (even its use as a metaphor may be counter-productive), (ii) that addiction is a “disorder of choice,” and (iii) thus “the use of evaluative and especially ethical vocabulary” remains relevant if not central:

“… [N]egative moral appraisal strengthens the person with addiction by reengaging with her as an apt valuer that could also act under the guise of the good, not only the apparent—and disappearing—good of her addiction. For … evaluative immaturity is what necessarily leads to less than successful pursuits, such as akrasia, weakness of will, and addiction. At the same time, however, evaluative immaturity is always object- or pursuit-centered rather than global: less than successful agency will take place under the guise of the good. And so success in action is never completely ruled out.” — Lubomira Radoilska, Addiction and Weakness of Will (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Nothing said above need contradict the following from Marcia Angell’s powerful review essay, “Opioid Nation,” in The New York Review of Books, (Dec. 6, 2018):

“Three years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an explosive paper about the surprising rise in mortality, starting at the turn of this century, among middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women. The increase was greater in women than in men. They found three main causes: drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-associated liver disease. They later called these ‘deaths of despair,’ because they were most common among workers in tenuous jobs, with only a high school education or less, who were struggling to stay afloat in isolated regions of the country. Dragged down by these deaths, in the past three years overall life expectancy in the United States has started to drop.

It’s not hard to see reasons for the despair. Most working-class Americans have not benefited from our booming economy, the fruits of which have gone almost entirely to the richest 10 percent. For the bottom half of the population, income has scarcely budged since the 1970s, while expenses for necessities like housing, health care, education, and child care have skyrocketed. In Appalachia, where the opioid epidemic first took hold, many coal miners were unemployed and would probably remain so. People expected they wouldn’t live as well as their parents had, and had little hope for their children. It is true that African-Americans still have higher overall mortality rates than whites, but that gap is closing rapidly for people under the age of sixty-five, particularly for women. By 2027, white women will have higher mortality rates than African-American women. Mortality for African-American men is falling even faster than for African-American women; it is projected to be equal to that of white men by 2030. But the epidemic has extended to all parts of the country and to all ethnic groups, so it’s unclear how the effects will be distributed in the future.

By the middle of this decade, the grotesque inequality in this country began to get the attention it deserves. And the growing awareness of that inequality fed the populist passion that, when twisted and distorted, produced the election of Donald J. Trump. It’s probably not coincidental, then, that the opioid epidemic got its second wind at about that time. It certainly marks the time when the opioids of choice changed from prescription drugs to the witches’ brew of street drugs. Did the epidemic explode because people were becoming aware that the American Dream was no longer theirs to dream?

As long as this country tolerates the chasm between the rich and the poor, and fails even to pretend to provide for the most basic needs of our citizens, such as health care, education, and child care, some people will want to use drugs to escape. This increasingly seems to me not a legal or medical problem, nor even a public health problem. It’s a political problem. We need a government dedicated to policies that will narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and ensure basic services for everyone. To end the epidemic of deaths of despair, we need to target the sources of the despair.”

(Of course one does not have to share my assessment of the crème-de-la-crème of the available literature to benefit from acquaintance with the titles in this compilation.)

The Triumph of Spectacle

In reading this, keep in mind that Chris Hedges is speaking to (readers within) several classes and strata in affluent countries, but in particular the U.S.

“We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers—[Neal] Gabler calls them ‘essentially drama coaches’—to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie [or ‘Reality’ TV series] of our own life. Martha Stewart built her financial empire, when she wasn’t insider trading, telling women how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities [or like celebrities in the small worlds we inhabit on a daily basis]. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look and how we present ourselves to others [greatly facilitated and encouraged by camera cell phones, social media, etc.].” – Chris Hedges, in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).

I take exception to the inclusion of “therapists” in the list above, although of course there are bad or quack therapists and therapies, but I don’t think psychoanalytic therapy ignores “actual family relationships,” nor is it about “appearances,” indeed, it could be said to deal almost entirely with everything behind, outside or beyond appearances. And therapists are a far cry from being “lifestyle advisers,” in no way promising the analysand happiness!

The Trump/Roberts Dust Up: They're Both Wrong

Judge Jon Tigar, a federal district judge, sitting in San Francisco recently ruled that the Trump administration had to resume hearing asylum claims from immigrants regardless of where they entered the United States. In response, Trump said that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, an appellate court, that handles appeals from Judge Tigar’s rulings was a lawless disgrace, and that Judge Tigar is an Obama judge.

In response, Chief Justice Roberts said we do not have Obama judges, or Trump judges, Bush judges, or Clinton judges. Instead, we have “dedicated,” “independent” judges. This claim of Roberts is reminiscent of his position at his confirmation hearings that judges are like impartial umpires calling balls and strikes.

In fact, judges are influenced by their background and it often makes a difference whether their politics are liberal or conservative. Judges are not just umpires and the line between law and politics is often thin.

Nonetheless, I believe that a sizeable majority of decisions in lower courts are unrelated to the political background of the judges, and most appeals are easy, generating no political controversy. Even at the Supreme Court level, where non-controversial appeals are few, many of the appeals do not trigger typical liberal/conservative divisions.

Most important, judges are not party hacks. They do not support or oppose positions taken by the Trump administration because the Trump administration has asked them to do so. They support or oppose such positions because in their legal view the administration is right or wrong.

Of course, Donald Trump does not understand this. He expects judges appointed by him to be “loyal.” He certainly expects Justice Kavanaugh to support the administration when asked to do so. I do not respect Justice Kavanaugh because of his substantive views, his lack of candor in his Senate testimony, and his treatment of Christine Ford. But I do not believe he will decide cases out of loyalty to Donald Trump. There is also no evidence that Judge Tigar or Judges on the Ninth Circuit are party hacks.

It is wrong of Roberts to sanitize the relationship between law and politics and wrong of Trump to insult the judiciary on specious grounds.

Toward mapping the terrain of psychology, spirituality, and politics: John Cottingham on psychoanalytic ethics

The few passages shared below are from John Cottingham’s, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reasons and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998). I find the argument they adumbrate utterly persuasive and thus believe these propositions spell out at least one way we might interpret and take seriously the late-1960s slogan that “the personal is political.” As such, it should be axiomatic to any Left-inspired emancipatory strategy and project that traces its pedigree to the three principles enshrined in the tripartite motto that first appeared in the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité (the last can and should be interpreted in an anthropological sense sans a specific gender reference, although some have come to prefer the term ‘solidarity’ in its place, an unfortunate choice if only because it lacks the stronger connotations of community that resonate with the concept of ‘fraternity’)

For example, one can think of the meaning of this slogan as suggesting a political argument along the lines first brought to the table by self-defined feminists in which things heretofore, by design or default, were thought to be confined to the realm of “the private,” as matters that arise, one might say, in the intimate realm of everyday life, such as sexual or erotic relations, gender issues, women’s control over their own bodies, the household division of labor, marriage (or the choice to remain single) and so forth. In brief, these have political implications, and more significantly, claim classical political topics and questions in conjunction with conventional political actions invariably affect, in one way or another, the very constitution of privacy and the character of the intimate realm, including whether or not women are indeed truly equal to men in intimate, social and political realms. In short, the oppression of women and gender issues more widely flesh out the phrase “the personal is political.”

But we may accord an additional and no less important meaning to this proposition, one that suggests, for example, that questions of existential meaning (which are treated from various perspectives, both religious and non-religious or humanist), of vulnerability and suffering, of joy and the possibilities for happiness or human fulfillment, of the role—indeed salience—of the passions or emotions, of personal character or virtues and vices, of human nature and personhood, of personal and collective identity, of the meaning of “the Good,” and the good life, of knowledge and ignorance all, in one way or another, have implications for, are connected to or in dialectical and mutually constitutive relations with, the political, defined in the broadest sense (i.e., as something including but more than conventional power politics or the politics of elites, democratic or otherwise). In one sense, we might therefore say that realization of the significance of this proposition implies, assumes, or simply asserts the belief that conventional power politics can be brought closer in alignment with our visions of the Good, with the spiritual and ethical components of our personal lifeworlds or worldviews (the former being the individual or idiosyncratic articulation of one or more of the latter), with our most cherished values, with the inner world.

Perhaps another way to express this, like Gandhi, and using a metaphor more common to the religio-philosophical traditions of his family in India, is to say that politics is capable of being “purified”(for Gandhi, this involved a corresponding process of personal ‘purification’ or what we might prefer to term individuation or self-realization*), that public and political conduct is capable, in principle, of adhering to the norms and ethical principles and moral standards we apply to personal life and private conduct, that “the political” can and thus should endeavor to transcend both Realpolitik and raison d’état. In our time, the (especially philosophical) anarchists and post-structuralists have sought to trace the forces and effects of political power that has insinuated itself into the intimate realm (apart from the role such power plays in determining the nature and boundaries of private life) in both obvious and less visible ways which often serve to undermine or distort personal agency.

From a Gandhian-like conception of karma yoga, those of us on the Left who are genuinely committed to the path of spiritual and/or ethical living (i.e, not as some sort of New Age fad, affectation or lifestyle), who believe existential questions cannot be severed from political ones, that human suffering of all kinds is an urgent political subject (not always eliminable, to be sure, at least insofar as it is intrinsic to the human condition), that individuation and self-realization have political relevance and ramifications, that we must come to understand how the “inner world” is affected by and in turn capable of affecting the common good or the “Good society,” we are endeavoring or struggling to embody in political praxis the complex and subtle connections between the service of suffering humanity and the processes of individuation and self-realization (what Gandhi understood as spiritual self-purification).

Cottingham:

“The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to loss, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence [dukkha] as the Buddhists have it. And unless moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [‘spiritual exercises’ as found, for example, among the Stoics and monastic and mystical traditions] that enables us to come to terms with it.”

“Before we can begin on the project of seeing how we should live, we first have to embark on the task of trying to understand ourselves. That much, at least, is fully in accord with a long classical tradition stretching from the famous injunction at Delphi right down to Pope’s Essay on Man: “Know then thyself.” But what is new is the insistence that the process has to begin with an attempt to come to terms with the darker side of our nature—the side which is not revealed by simple introspection and rational weighing of ‘what on balance we most want,’ but which will be grasped only at the end of a long process of recovery, rehabilitating those parts of the self which are initially submerged beneath the level of ordinary everyday awareness.”

“The problem of mastering, or at least accommodating, the passions was seen in both Greek and in early modern ethics as absolutely central to philosophy’s goal of teaching us how to live. But the solutions offered by both of these earlier systems were defective in important respects, and…the defects only begin to be remedied with the development of the unconscious—the notion that important parts of the self are not fully transparent to the deliberations of reason.”

Cottingham turns, rightly I think, to psychoanalytic theory to transcend (aufheben) the Enlightenment trajectory (with Greek roots) of a purely ratiocentric philosophy and ethics (there are exceptions to this characterization, but the rise of Romanticism testifies to the extent of its truth), endeavoring “to uncover the seeds of an approach which comes to terms with the incapacity of controlling reason to settle the conditions for human well-being, while at the same time not abandoning the values of systematic analysis and rational reflection [which are, of course, intrinsic to psychoanalytic theory and practice].”

* For a thorough and incisive analysis of what Gandhi intended by the “purification of politics,” see the chapter on same in Raghavan Iyer’s nonpareil study, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 1979; 2^nd ed. Concord Grove Press, 1983).

A taste of further reading:

• Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton & Co. 2006).
• Bardacke, Frank. Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farmworkers (Verso, 2011).
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Coady, C.A.J. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life (Routledge, 2003).
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Coy, Patrick G. A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker (Temple University Press, 1988).
• Danielson, Leilah. American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
• Danto, Elizabeth Ann. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005).
• Frost, Jennifer. “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York University Press, 2001).
• Ganeri, Jonardon and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction (Sage Publications, 2012).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Green, Marcus E. and Serap A. Kayatekin, eds. Special Issue: Marxism and Spirituality,  Rethinking Marxism: a journal of economics, culture & society, Vol. 28, Nos. 3-4 (July-October 2016).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979).
• Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters (MIT Press, 2004).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
• Rodrigues, Valerian, ed. The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (Oxford University Press, 2002).
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
• Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
• Wiggins, David. Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Zelliot, Eleanor. Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (Navayana Publishing, 2013 edition).

I also have a more than a few bibliographies chock full of titles germane to topics broached above: please see here for a list with links.

“It is what it is”

Horrific crimes can be committed, and tolerated or ignored, be they municipal or international, or environmental, human rights can be dismissed as irrelevant, and ethical and social norms routinely and flagrantly violated, as long as it contributes to what Trump—a pathological narcissist and megalomaniacal menace in the highest office of the land—understands as putting “America First” or “Making America Great Again” (MAGA), both mind-numbing nationalist slogans understood in final reference to a bottom line defined in terms of money (obscene profits at one end, and conspicuous consumption at the other). The President is shamelessly fond of authoritarian rulers around the globe and despotism more generally. Democratic norms, values, and laws are not relevant to this crude and immoral economic calculus. The constitutional rule of law is viewed as an annoying obstacle to MAGA that will be removed once a sufficient number of compliant if not sycophantic federal judges and Supreme Court Justices are found to be wholly deferential to the executive branch. We now have a capitalist plutocracy and kleptocracy, or perhaps better, a capitalist oligarchy, with a thin veneer of democratic and constitutional rhetoric serving to obfuscate the enduring reign of “bread and circuses” among the masses.

A summary introduction to the Freudian psychoanalytic model of therapeutic psychology

I think it is true that Freudian interpretation depends generally on the everyday reason-explanation model—sometimes called ‘folk psychology’—which it then expands in various ways, and that precisely this is one of its strengths. — Marcia Cavell

1. In brief, and thus minimally speaking, psychoanalytic theory provides us with a theory of irrationality (not identical to existing from other forms of irrationality, psychologically based or otherwise) that involves both propositional and non-propositional mental states or primary and secondary process thinking;¹
2. a philosophically sophisticated psychology, a metapsychology, and a therapeutic model of psychology;
3. a method of scientific investigation as a “science of subjectivity” (at once intra-clinical and extra-clinical, psychoanalysis being the ‘first great theory and practice of personal life’), psychoanalytic explanation involving both causal relations and relations of meaning, with the analysis of symbolism depending upon their mutual inextricability (we might plausibly imagine a ‘grammar, semantics, pragmatics’ of psychoanalysis);
4. a dyadic model of therapeutic treatment involving the analyst and analysand;
5. a triune psyche consisting of the id, ego, and super-ego as subsets, so to speak, of “the person;”
6. the postulation of a notion of repression as a mechanism that explains the inaccessibility of mental states sans the imputation of intention;
7. and related to repression, sophisticated concepts of suppression, wish-fulfillment, phantasy, and sublimation implicating “unconscious” as well as sub-conscious and conscious states of awareness;
8. the building blocks for models of self-deception and states of denial;
9. the postulation of somewhat opaque and elusive psychological dynamics such as introjection, identification, and projection, as well as more routine or common psychological processes of remembering, repeating, free-association, working-through, and play (or playing);² and
10. specific and explicit value commitments, including a commitment to the ideal of truth, which treat in both philosophical and psychological terms, the questions, possibility, and normative importance of moral autonomy, (retrospective and prospective) self-responsibility, happiness or contentment (in the sense of eudaimonia), existential freedom, rationality, and the notion of “worthwhile” or fulfilling life in general.³ 

The therapeutic model of psychoanalytic psychology entails, like most therapeutic relationships, a relation of unequal power involving scientific and therapeutic authority derived from professional training and clinical discoveries, as well as the corresponding knowledge provided by its psychological “theory” or model, “hypotheses,” and methods. The analyst/analysand relationship likewise involves an asymmetry of needs and desires. Reality has been described as “mediated” to the patient by the analyst in the form of an “erotic” communication bringing into conjunction and play both the “pleasure” and “reality” principles. These facts become conspicuous with the onset of transference, as the analyst becomes the embodied site of an “auxiliary” ego or super-ego as an idiosyncratic world comes into view, soon followed by counter-transference: psychological dynamics which place the analyst in a “privileged” position as historian, teacher, and healer (through transference, resistance, and interpretation), although there remains a risk that the analyst and analysand will enter into a “narcissistic” collaboration. The therapeutic setting relies on forms of linguistic, symbolic, and bodily communication that assume the presence of various levels of conscious and subconscious mental states that respond to processes of empathy, self-observation, and (clinical) judgment. The clinical setting becomes a safe and trusting space for “play” which, in turn, is capable of transporting the participants into another “world”/reality, one with its own situational constraints. This fragile yet safe space for play and spontaneity permits the emergence of a genuinely shared reality betwixt and between the individual lifeworlds and worldviews of the analyst and the analysand.⁴

Psychotherapy demands the mastery of a therapeutic craft or art by the analyst and the acquisition of sundry emotional and practical-cognitive skills on the part of the analysand. One—if not the—overarching goal of the therapeutic process is to account for and overcome the analysand’s lack of self-knowledge while providing the psychological space for at least a rudimentary commitment to the process of individuation.⁵ The knowledge of other minds, which presumes a model of folk psychology, permits and encourages experiential sensitivity (‘concentrated listening’) that is simultaneously personalized and contextualized—built up over the course of a long and profound acquaintance with a particular person and his social and cultural surroundings (both large and small), and informed, meaning the psychoanalyst will draw upon an  extensive conceptual vocabulary and clinical training to make sense of what the analysand has been motivated to say, as well as making inferences with regard to what has not been said (motivated or otherwise). Narratives of one kind or another, be they fragmented or manifestly coherent, involving memory (with varying degrees of veracity) and notions of personal and collective identity, will often be prominent in the clinical setting, although the analyst must remain cognizant of the possible if not likely difference between actual lives and the stories told about those lives. Psychoanalytic psychology has shared conceptual and disciplinary boundaries with medicine and psychiatry, academic psychology, biology, the neurosciences, sociology, anthropology, and the humanities, especially art, literature  (e.g., narrative and hermeneutics) and philosophy (in particular, philosophy of mind: consciousness/subconscious(ness)/the unconscious, the emotions, personal identity, and moral psychology, but also ethics, epistemology, and even metaphysics).⁶ With regard to ethics and moral psychology, questions of egoism, psychological and ethical hedonism, moral conscientiousness, wishful thinking, weakness of will, self-deception, and denial may be prominent. With regard to moral psychology, the emotions, rather than drives, are now often at the center of its theory of motivation, and motivations are recognized as typically mixed and “overdetermined,” as the traditional conceptual cluster of terms that define Freudian metapsychology (instincts and drive theory) are often challenged, revised, or even rejected.⁷

Notes:
    1. Jonathan Lear elaborates: “Psychoanalysis tends to move simultaneously in two directions. On the one hand, it tries to discover a hidden irrationality in the thought, speech and action which presents itself as rational. On the other hand, it tries to find rationality hidden within the irrational. There among the flotsam of dreams, physical symptoms, slips of the tongue, psychoanalysis discovers that mind is active.”

2. Cf. Lear: “In the analytic situation there tends to be an inverse correlation between remembering and repeating. In the analytic situation, ‘the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.’ So, for instance, the analysand does not remember that he used to be defiant towards his parents, but he acts defiantly now toward the analyst.”

3. Cf. the late Eugene Victor Wolfenstein: “In theory and practice Freud offers us only amelioration of and consolation for the pain of being human—only the chance to be ordinarily unhappy.”

4. Cf. Lear: “The psychoanalytic situation is structured to offer an existential Sabbath: a benign environment that does not produce too much anxiety....”

5. Again, in the words of Lear, “Freudian method has a Socratic quality to it: through a particular type of ‘cross-examination,’ the patient’s own beliefs about his past and his emotional life are elicited, and eventually ‘refuted’—in the sense that he is shown to have an inadequate conscious understanding of who he is, what has happened to him and how he feels about it.” Moreover, “[f]ar from seeking to return a disturbed individual to a preexisting order, as the shaman, healer, or priest did, [Freud] formulated the analytic project as a personal and provisional hermeneutic of self-discovery, one that a psychoanalyst could facilitate but not control. In this way, he gave expression to possibilities of individuality, authenticity, and freedom that had only recently emerged, and opened the way to a new understanding of social life.”

6. As Joseph Schwartz says, “To those who regard the world of human feeling as inherently unreliable, who distrust the novel and poetry as a source of human knowledge, the claims of psychoanalysis will always be unsatisfactory.”

7. Ernest Wallwork reminds us that “...Freud expressed great caution with respect to his entire meta-psychological enterprise. He repeatedly described the metapsychology as ‘tentative,’ ‘speculative,’ and ‘hypothetical,’ and even went so far as to call it a ‘phantasy,’ a ‘myth,’ a product of wish fulfillment on the part of its creator.”

My bibliography for Freudian psychology is here. The introduction to that compilation contains embedded links to related bibliographies (e.g., on ‘the emotions,’ and ‘dreams and dreaming’) that may also be of interest.

Freud’s conception of happiness as eudaimonia or human fulfillment

It is philosophers who have the task of exploring what matters to us most—what is freedom? What is it genuinely for us to be happy? What is worth valuing and why?—but it is psychoanalysis that teaches us how we regularly get in the way of our own freedom, systematically make ourselves unhappy and use values for covert and malign purposes. Philosophy cannot live up to its task unless it takes these psychoanalytic challenges seriously. — Jonathan Lear

“The parts of Freud’s writings that suggest some level of causal determination in fact coexist with his explicit view that one of the chief goals of psychoanalysis is to increase the patient’s ‘freedom’ (Freiheit), ‘autonomy’ (Selbstandigkeit), and ‘initiative’ (Initiative). Thus the aim of psychoanalysis is to ‘free’ (befrein) the patient from intrapsychic ‘chains’ (die Fesseln), which normally increases the patient’s ‘self-control’ (Selbstbeherrschung) and gives ‘the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other’ between conflicting motives. For Freud, it is the mark of a relatively healthy ego to be able to deliberate and exercise self-control and willpower in choosing and pursuing goals. [….]

Freud’s claim that the developed ego is guided by qualitative hedonism helps to bring out just how in his late writings ‘the programme of the pleasure principle’ is compatible with non-egoistic, and hence, moral behavior. This compatibility is largely a consequence of the fact that happiness as Freud uses the term for the goal of life is a different kind of end then the quantitative one of maximizing a single kind of agreeable feeling. ‘Happiness’ in life is an ‘inclusive end’ rather than a single ‘dominant end.’ That is to say, the activities through which it is sought are not means in an instrumental or neutral sense, but parts of a whole. To pursue happiness as an inclusive goal through such activities as artistic creativity, intellectual work, sensuality, love, and aesthetic appreciation is to enjoy each of these activities as contributing something qualitatively unique to a life plan. Insofar as these activities are means, it is in the sense of being constitutive of the comprehensive end of happiness in life as a whole. It is only through such activities that genuine happiness in the sense of ‘positive fulfillment’ is possible [Here we see Freud’s conception of ‘happiness’ is close if not identical to the classical Greek concept of eudaimonia, or at least several well-known conceptions thereof and which we might translate in the best sense to mean or imply the possibility of human fulfillment, the triune nature of which arguably entails, minimally and broadly speaking, freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-realization. The converse of such human fulfillment could be said to found in the several senses in which Marx employs the concept of alienation throughout his writings.*] [....] Freud does not construe narrowly, then, the happiness at which the ego aims as always involving a self-interested goal. To the contrary, persons are observed to find pleasure in a whole range of activities, including fulfilling the needs of others, and even in moral conscientiousness. For there is ‘satisfaction’ to be obtained in acting benevolently in accordance with one’s ‘ego ideal’ and ‘a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal.’”—Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991)

* The notion of alienation (there are three terms in German for this which range from the descriptive to the evaluative) is one of the fundamental concepts in Marx’s work, expressly in the early writings and more implicitly or assumed in his later, systematic critique of capitalism. I want here merely to highlight two books in which I’ve found the discussion of Marx’s conception of alienation (used in several different senses) quite helpful, indeed, indispensable: Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (1985) and R.G. Peffer’s Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (1990). For now, let me express wholehearted agreement with the following from Peffer:

“The moral content of the various forms of alienation Marx describes in the Manuscripts [i.e., the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844], the moral grounds upon which he condemns these forms of alienation [e.g., the historical and general alienation suffered by the majority of human beings from the ‘objects and products of material and intellectual production,’ as well as alienation from ‘the process of production, other persons, nature, and [our] own selves], i.e., “human life,” or [our] own “species-being,” [this last is similar if not identical to later existentialist construals of fundamental alienation or estrangement as part and parcel of the human condition, as intrinsic to a philosophical anthropology or as a metaphysical proposition] can, I think, be reduced to three primary moral principles to which he implicitly subscribes in the Manuscripts and throughout the rest of his writings. These principles are freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-realization.”

I would like to note in closing that we need not assume freedom need imply “maximally unbounded and unburdened choice” in keeping with the classical Liberal belief that “people tend to fare best when they possess, more or less, the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish,” what Daniel N. Haybron views as central to “liberal optimism” or what I would term, perhaps more precisely, “libertarian optimism,” which is found among left-liberals as well. Please see Haybron’s The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008). For a taste of rather different understandings of what freedom might or should entail, in other words, that does not presuppose or assume the unconditional value of “maximally unbounded and unburdened choice,” see Jon Elster’s Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and the essays collected in Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds., Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010). On how this more modest (realistic?) conception of what freedom ideally entails is compatible with Marxist conceptions of self-realization and human fulfillment, see Elster’s article, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

“Camp fire evacuees face hardship, disease and desperation”

“Made homeless by flames, Camp fire evacuees face hardship, disease and desperation”

By Nicole Santa Cruz , Maria L. La Ganga  and Marisa Gerber, for the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 15, 2018

Don Hardin burrowed between blankets in his SUV, and switched on the heater whenever the shivers returned. Even during the day Thursday, the 81-year-old Camp fire evacuee, who has arthritis, struggled to stay warm. When temperatures dropped near freezing Wednesday night, Hardin popped a sleeping pill.

Nearby, a woman bear-hugged her grandson for body heat and, inside a small green tent, a man had nightmares of his escape from flames — he flashed back to the car he watched drive into the fire, wondering if he could have saved the people inside.

It had been one week since the Camp fire destroyed everything they owned and respite still seemed out of sight. In a region that was facing a housing shortage even before the fire, some survivors were forced to seek refuge in a tent city outside a Walmart in Chico. For others, evacuation centers established outside the burn zone have become breeding grounds for disease. On Thursday, Butte County health authorities warned that an outbreak of norovirus was spreading with alarming speed, and appeared to have sickened survivors in at least four shelters.

In the days since sheets of flames sprinted through Paradise, killing at least 63 people and decimating the entire town in minutes, evacuees have endured hardship and sorrow in a surreal state of limbo. Some sleep in their trucks to keep warm and swallow tears as they imagine the shells of their homes. Others pray that unanswered texts to missing friends don’t mean what they think they mean, and they feign normalcy for the sake of their children.

“Rain is coming and these people need a shelter over their heads,” said Debby Barbero, a volunteer who has been coordinating donations at the tent settlement. As a group, the volunteers decided that Sunday at 1 p.m., they would need to shut down the makeshift donation center and tent city and try to help people find shelter in the meantime. “This is unsustainable right now,” she said, adding that it has been difficult to find shelter space for evacuees.

Matters weren’t much better for those who had managed to find space in the evacuation centers. By Thursday, an outbreak of the highly contagious norovirus had spread to several shelters. At the evacuation locations, 145 people had come down with vomiting or diarrhea, said Lisa Almaguer, the public information officer for the Butte County Department of Public Health. Twenty-five people had been hospitalized, she said. “The number of sick people is increasing every day,” Almaguer said.

Outside Walmart on Wednesday, volunteers weaved through tents, handing out homemade muffins and warm towels, which people used to clean their faces. A man who had just spent $30 inside the store offered toiletries and kept his eyes peeled for the perfect family. [….] The rest of the article is here.

Comment: Given the money and resources monopolized by the military, as well as the enormous amount of wealth (even if most of it is in the hands of the rich and richest) in this country, this state of affairs is absolutely inexcusable. There is no good (or justificatory) reason for these evacuees to have their suffering enhanced and prolonged in this manner.

Housekeeping Note

I have removed a number of authors from the blog who have not posted for at least a year (by my recollection); if any of them wish to be restored, I would be happy to put their names back. At the moment, however, I do not expect them to post. If any of them wish to put up a post, but not rejoin the blog, I would be happy to make sure it gets posted. If I have kept someone who does not expect to post in the future, please let me know.

Well, the authors in question are still there! I will contact typepad to inquire about the workings of the software.

The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies): A Select Bibliography

Here is my latest bibliography (that should be it for a while): The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies).

Related compilations (i.e., with family resemblance of some kind):

• The Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Modern Iran
• Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
• Islam and Jurisprudence
• Islam and Muslims in the U.S.
• Islamic Studies
• The Prophet Muhammad
• Sufism

Miscellany:

• Democracy and Islam
  
• Poetry & Islam essay
  
• Islam Study Guide 
• Book Review: Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004)

The Prophet Muhammad: a basic bibliography

My 100^th bibliography (books, in English) is on The Prophet Muhammad.

The possible transcendence of Donald Trump’s narcissistic and authoritarian temper tantrums

“Trump’s authoritarian backlash has already begun”

By Brian Klaas, for The Washington Post, November 9, 2018

“American democracy is now considerably safer than it was before Tuesday, but we’re not out of the woods by a long shot. For the first time in American history, a president with authoritarian instincts occupies the White House. By now, President Trump’s mimicry of the world’s despots and dictators is well-established. He attacks the press, pardons political allies while calling for the jailing of political enemies, and scapegoats minorities while wrapping himself in a symbolic flag of xenophobic nationalism. His administration is plagued with blatant corruption and ethics violations and nepotism. And his rhetoric is a constant stream of Orwellian lies, punctuated by routine incitements to political violence, and endless praise for dictatorial monsters that he doesn’t just tolerate but actually loves.

But this week, a new chapter begins in the fight to protect American democracy. The battle lines are clear: Democrats can now constrain Trump in new and crucial ways. The Trump wrecking ball — the one that he gleefully smashed into democratic institutions while Republicans in Congress watched the rubble fall — is now on a much shorter chain. Now Trump will face constraints from Democrats exercising their formal powers. But a cornered fighter can be even more dangerous. Trump might lash out against his newfound political confinement, becoming more mercurial, more willing to take risks and more authoritarian.” [….]

The rest of the article is here.

Comment:

When Trump says “Americans must unify,” what he means is that we must unite as one mass behind him and his regressive and neo-fascist politics. He cannot admit that his litany of irresponsible and irrational rhetoric has made any contribution whatsoever to a poisoned national political climate which has found most of the Right, and thus the Republican Party, slavishly adhering to “their Leader,” untethered to reality insofar as that is circumscribed by its intrinsic relation to facts and truth. He does not understand the invaluable and necessary roles of argument, criticism and dissent (including public protest) in a would-be democracy that is at once electoral, participatory, and deliberative (for him, only money and authoritarian power deserve a voice). When political pundits and talking heads on TV repeat that “all of us” must “tone it down,” or that “everybody must take a breath,” I say “f*ck that.” The President and his mass media lackeys (e.g., FOX News and Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter...) are the ones, in the first instance and ever since, responsible for a reckless and degrading political rhetoric that is crudely fashioned with the blunt tools of black and white thinking and forged in the fires of our most vulnerable emotions (hatred, rage, fear, anxiety, insecurity…). I feed no need whatsoever to “tone” anything down, nor should the vast majority of us on the Left.

Please tell me that these attempted bombings have no relation whatsoever to the President's irresponsible and reckless demagogic rhetoric and the support he receives from right-wing media sources like FOX News and radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh that likewise sow the seeds of hatred, rage, fear, insecurity, racism, sexism, extreme polarization, fascism, and all forms of violence.

The socio-pathological undercurrents in our society are seeping up with more frequency through fissures in the fragile membrane that is our “civilization.” The President responds by calling for armed guards at houses of worship and more frequent application of the death penalty, thereby according legal and political sanction to the very social and cultural pathologies that plague us. In brief, he proposes a new variation on Fromm’s locution, “the pathology of normalcy.”

I agree with much in the article by Klass, although it appears not to adequately appreciate the extent to which Trump’s presidency is at the same time symptomatic and expressive of wider social (including environmental), political, and economic trends and forces, few if any of which, it seems safe to conclude, will be substantially addressed by the Democrats (no, that does not mean one should not vote and support them), given the constitution of both the Senate and Supreme Court, as well as the moneyed interests that continue to dominate our would-be democracy. Nor will these trends and forces be sufficiently addressed if Trump is impeached or fails to achieve a second term. Our “capitalist democracy” remains in the grips of what has been called “neoliberalism,” (although this term’s insinuations fail to do justice to those aspects of the Liberal tradition which will be essential to any robust democratic society, including a socialist one, as well as failing to properly locate and identify the essential referential object: capitalism), and the crises it face are internally and externally variegated, the foremost of the latter type being the global warming associated with climate change (see Bill McKibben’s piece, ‘A Very Grim Forecast,’ in the Nov. 28 issue of the New York Review of Books). The “internal” crises we have yet to confront arise largely, but not exclusively, from forces unleashed by the Great Financial Crisis (many of which were in existence before the financial collapse of 2008), these account for the rapid rise of authoritarian and extremist right wing movements, parties, and rulers around the globe (most of which are far worse than what we are facing in this country). Another of the trends, irrespective of the two dominant political parties, has to do with the “unchecked executive power” that has become entrenched in the office of the presidency (see, for example, the respective titles by Wills, Nelson, and Alford below). I’ll stop here, leaving you with works I recommend should one care to look beyond the horrors if not evils rightly attributed to the character and presidency of Donald Trump (which I’ve spoken to elsewhere in a paper on his pathological narcissism):

• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
• Chang, Ha-Joon. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
• Cole, David and James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution (The New Press, 3^rd ed., 2006).
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd ed., 2003).
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Hasen, Richard L. Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (Yale University Press, 2016).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017).
• Mayer, Jane. Dark Money (Doubleday, 2016).
• Nelson, Dana D. Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
• Sanger, David E. Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. New York: Crown, 2012.
• Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking, 2018).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Press, 2010).
• Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Islam & Jurisprudence: a basic bibliography

My latest bibliography is on Islam & Jurisprudence (or, if one prefers, ‘Islamic Law’). The introduction:

This compilation, like most of my bibliographies, has two constraints: books, in English. I trust the inference will not be made that this implies the best works are only in English, as it merely reflects the limits of my knowledge and research. “Jurisprudence” in this case can refer to Islamic philosophy and/or theory of law, as well as historical and existing legal systems in those countries in which Islam is (i) a state-sanctioned religion, (ii) predominant as a religious orientation in the society, (iii) or has a significant impact on the country’s legal system in one way or another. I have used the phrase “Islam and Jurisprudence” for the title to reflect the fact that it is a perilous endeavor to conclusively identify, except perhaps philosophically or theologically (and even then, there are inherent problems), Islamic law as such (i.e., in any kind of absolutist or ‘pure’ sense) in legal systems on the ground, as we say, even if we rightly derive warrant for this appellation from both emic and etic reasons. This list does not aspire to be exhaustive, although I hope it is at least representative of the depth and breadth of the available literature. I welcome suggestions for titles I may have inadvertently missed.

Related compilations:

• The Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Modern Iran
• Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
• Islam and Muslims in the United States
• Islamic Studies
• Sufism

The following material by yours truly may also be of interest:

• Book Review: Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004)
• Democracy and Islam
• Poetry and Islam
• Islam Study Guide

Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980)

Today is the birthday of Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980), founder, with Peter Maurin, of the Catholic Worker Movement and newspaper. Here is a short list of titles, most of which are about Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker movement and newspaper. The FBI still includes the movement on its list of “domestic advocacy groups” that it believes necessary to keep tabs on.

The Catholic Worker Movement:

• Coles, Robert. A Spectacle Unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement. New York: Viking, 1973.
• Coles, Robert. Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987.
• Cornell, Thomas C. and James H. Forest, eds. A Penny a Copy: Readings from the Catholic Worker. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
• Coy, Patrick, ed. A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988.
• Ellis, Marc. A Year at the Catholic Worker. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.
• Ellis, Marc. Peter Maurin: Prophet in the Twentieth Century. New York: Paulist Press, 1981.
• Ellsberg, Robert, ed. By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
• Ellsberg, Robert, ed. The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. New York: Image Books, 2008.
• Ellsberg, Robert, ed. All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day. New York: Image Books, 2010.
• Forest, Jim. All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011.
• Piehl, Mel. Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker Movement and the Origins of Catholic Radicalism in America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982.
• Roberts, Nancy L. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

See too this bibliography on Radical Catholicism.

 

Combating Trump's Replacement of Sessions

John Schindler, formerly with the NSA, tweets that the Mueller data has been shared and the intelligence community has backups of Mueller's work. Laurence Tribe is arguing that the appointment of Whitaker violates the Vacancy Reform Act (assuming that Sessions was fired). Whitaker will presumably be advised that he has to recuse himself. If he refuses to do so, he runs a risk of himself being disbarred and he could ultimately be prosecuted for obstruction of justice (if he seeks to protect Trump). Meanwhile, if the Russians have been laundering money through the auspices of Trump's business interests, the New York AG will be more than willing to take civil and criminal action if Mueller cannot do so. 

 

 

Reason and the “pre-logical”

I think the following terms are distinct but interrelated concepts: that which is (i) a-rational (or non-rational), (ii) rational, (iii) irrational, and (iv) para- or supra-rational. However, typically we think only of rationality and its converse, irrationality. In examining religious doctrines and religious experience—and perhaps other religious phenomena—for example, we may find occasions when it helps to describe and distinguish that which we are examining not merely according to whether or not it can be characterized as rational or irrational, but possibly and more precisely as non-rational and/or supra-rational (the latter involving transcendence but not necessarily negation of ‘rationality’ or that which is rational). Among (at least some) philosophers, there seems to be a tendency to think that which is not rational is therefore irrational, ignoring the other two possibilities cited above. Incidentally, my motivation for making this point appears to overlap a bit with the reasons that prompted the late A.C. Graham to have a collection of articles posthumously published under the title, Unreason within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality [the subtitle, however, was not Graham’s, as David Lynn Hall explains in the Foreword] (Open Court, 1992).

In particular, Graham’s use of the notion of the “pre-logical” captures some of what is meant by the “non-rational” and “the para-rational.” One should not think of the prefix in “pre-logical” as meaning or implying something that is historically and philosophically inferior to that which comes after it, namely, the “logical.” According to Graham, we should consider that thinking which is “pre-logical” in the sense that it functions as a presupposition or axiomatic assumption or intuitive or axiological foundation (even if fallible or revisable), in other words, that “which reason depends if it is to have anything but its own malfunctions to test,” thus viewing “reason itself from a wider perspective.”

In a summary of John Dewey’s thought in this regard, Hilary Putnam writes: “we can only start from where we are. Where we are includes both our sufferings and enjoyments (our valuings) and our evaluations, the latter coming from both our community and ourselves.” In other words, reason or rationality itself arises within the context of our overarching ideals of human flourishing and fulfillment. The “rational” is rightly focused on inference, demonstration, and argument, or that which in principle is amenable to same, while the non-rational and the para-rational—Graham’s “pre-logical”—concerns itself with the evocative, the valuational, the emotional (while emotions often have a cognitive dimension and their expressions can often be judged as rational or irrational, in themselves they are neither rational or irrational), or what Nicholas Rescher terms “inexplicable facts” or “unexplained explainers,” or more broadly, the “existential.” Inductive reasoning, fact/value entanglement, questions of value and interpretation, questions of consciousness or personal awareness, intentionality, rhetoric, aesthetic experience, among other things, compel us to cross our conceptual and pragmatic boundaries between the non-rational, the rational (or irrational), and the supra-rational (thereby cross-fertilizing our conceptions of rationality, irrationality, non-rationality, and supra-rationality) ... and these, in turn, the boundaries between reason or philosophy and psychology. Our brief sketch of this circumscription or simply more modest picture of rationality or reason, in no way serves to diminish its necessity or significance for philosophy or its role in our daily lives.