The Hermeneutics of the Subject - Michel Foucault

The adventure into the Introduction to Hegel's 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' ended quite sadly, in that it seemed to contain more of a history of philosophy up to the advent of Hegel than it did an actual explication of Hegel's work. I'll come back to Hegel in the summer.

Meanwhile, nestled amongst the shelves of Macquarie Library amongst which I am supposed to research metabotropic receptors and validity shrinkage, I've found a copy of Foucault's lectures on The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Baldly :) , it 'rawks'.

Eventually I hope to be able to describe in detail a bunch of meditative practices that are oriented around the contemplation of paradox. Meanwhile, I was looking for a way to adequately distinguish between what philosophy, and what spirituality, is, because I'm interested in building a solid birthing point for these practices. It's less about justification and rationalisation than it is about a healing, of sorts, that is at it's most effective when the subject (that is, us) is able to most deeply comprehend the territory that we encounter. It's hard to describe what I'm on about, until you actually feel it, but after a lifetime of marginalising sensitivities, I'm on about setting a path to the soapbox to give them some air time.

Foucault more than meets my meagre demands regarding the philosophy/spirituality distinction. Blessed be his wire-rimmed glasses, blessed be the clear space of his Nietzschean self. There's a little more of a focus on 'truth' than I had given creedence to in my thinking. I like the challenge of this - I consider 'truth' to be a word like 'God' - it's chief function amongst us humans devolves more towards discord than harmony. I need to consider truth's relevance.

Anyrate, in brief, Foucault is attempting to reshape what he perceives to be a skewed Western interpretation of gnothi seauton, 'know thyself', by arguing that knowing oneself can really only take place a framework that he argues was established by Socrates, the epimeleia heautou, 'the care of the self'. The skew happened by virtue of the Cartesian split, where 'knowing yourself' became the fundamental privileged way of right access to the truth. In the same movement he argued that the care of the self was completely discredited and remains so, by our culture.

' Let's stand back a little to consider this. We will call, if you like, 'philosophy' the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether or not we can separate the true and the false. We will call 'philosophy' the form of thought that asks what it is that determine the conditions and limits of the subject's access to the truth. If we call this 'philosophy' then I think we could call 'spirituality' the search, practice and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call 'spirituality' then the

set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modification of existence, etc, which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject's very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth.'

He goes on to say spirituality in the West has three characteristics:

1) It postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right - it is not a simple act of connaissance, rather, 'he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject's being into play. '

2) The conversion can be a movement of the subject from his current status and condition - Foucault calls this eros (love) or askeisis (work), where the subject takes responsibility for a long labour of transformation.

3) While the truths at the outcome have the necessary function and limitation of the spiritual approach used to gain them, there are what he calls 'rebound' effects, the effects of the truth upon the subject.

Truth is not just knowledge for the subject, truth here 'enlightens' the subject - giving beatitude to the soul. The very being of the subject is transfigured.

At this point he states that the Gnostic movement, in it's overloading of connaissance with spiritual implications actually violates his whole argument. He wants us to have a look at the conditions of this knowledge, and to acknowledge :) that the 'rebound effect', the full implications of this, can be most adequately realised and described in the face of non-knowledge, in an ongoing encounter with an ever deepening sense of the world. Truth cannot save the subject. Knowledge cannot save the subject. Care of the self, I think we will find, is what he postulates as our potential salvation.

The Mystery of Christ and the Beheading of John the Baptist

As an introvert with a socially constructed 'I', I've yet to figure out a way to Toot My Own Horn in a way that doesn't feel downright fraudulent.

To bend the rod of this, a little, I can say that I'm satisfied enough with my posting to The Order of St Esclarmonde online, this week, to own up to having written it, and to post it, here. Each week we take a look at the Meditation Intent for the Week, as available in the Ecclesia Gnostica Calendar. This week, the intent is 'The Mystery of Christ' with a Collect in commemoration of the Beheading of St John The Baptist, celebrated in the Roman Rite on the 29th August:

I like this blend, of the Mystery of Christ with the beheading of St
John the Baptist, of which Universalis.com gives a poetic account:

'John the Baptist is the only saint in the calendar (apart from St
Joseph) who has two feasts to himself. One, in August, celebrates his
death, and one, in June, celebrates his birth. And this is as it
should be, for as Christ himself said, John was the greatest of the
sons of men.
The greatest, but also the most tragic. A prophet from before his
birth, leaping in the womb to announce the coming of the incarnate
God, his task was to proclaim the fulfilment of all prophecies – and
thus his own obsolescence. And he did it: with unequalled courage he
spread the news that he, the greatest of all men, was the least in the
kingdom of heaven. His disciples, and the devil, would have preferred
him to fight, to build his sect, to defeat this upstart whom he
himself had baptized, to seize his place in history. But he did not –
and so, rightly, he has his place, and he has glory in heaven.'

It's a heck of a lot less clinical than the Mark 6:17 and the Matthew
14:1 versions of the King Herod story (see 'Sources' to read them
online).

Blend this Universalis blurb with the Lesson from the EG Lectionary on
the Mystery of Christ:

'The lesson is taken from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah:

There shall come forth a rod out of Jesse and a branch shall grow out
of his root; and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the
Spirit of Wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and of reverence to the Lord. He shall not
judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing
of his ears; but with righteousness shall he judge the poor and
reprove with equity for the meek of the earth; and righteousness shall
be the girdle of his loins and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.
They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth
shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the
sea. '

And so we have John, with an awareness of his built-in obsolescence,
acting in his capacity as the Forerunner, the Prophet of Christ.
Christ with his built-in Logos - his creative voice that is the
rational account of a full knowledge of the earth, as he encounters
it.

I love this blend, because if we take a moment to internalise the
voices of these two biblical characters - if we actually take this
injunction within ourselves and strive into the paradox of being both
Jesus-and-John at once, we come to be living expressions of
generativity.

Generativity is where we take creativity and apply it to our own lived
lives - it gives us the grace to walk a Jesus path, freely choosing
our own expression of our virtues, while realising at the same time
our inner John, our own built-in obsolescence. It asks that we
acknowledge not only that we may be biological parents, but in a way
we are also cultural parents, that what we create and leave behind
will be a scaffolding, in a sense, for the next generation to build
their lives from. It means that we might sacrifice part of our own
consumption of the worlds' resources, for example, for the health and
benefit of our children. It might mean that we raise our voices a
little more loudly for social justice, or volunteer our own resources
to further causes that we know in our hearts, are worthy.

It's probably a fair observation that I'm a little given to
psychologising spirituality, but, taking the interpretation of the
Greek word 'homily' as a conversation, I'm planning on spending a
little meditation time this week encouraging my inner sense of Christ
to have a bit of a gas-bag (that is, talk) with my inner beheaded
John. It's a way to contemplate my own death, which, in comparison to
Tibetan Buddhism, for example, I find there is very little
encouragement within Christianity to do.

Sources:

http://www.universalis.com/20090829/today.htm
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2014:1-12%20;Mark%206:17-29
http://gnosis.org/ecclesia/lect087.htm

Age Shall Not Weary Her

Late last week, Etta, a woman a little older than me, that I worked alongside a few years back, passed away into the eternal rest. She had suffered, and fought, with Hep C, and long bouts of liver and kidney complications. Her command of English was never strong enough for me to fully get the gist of the nature of her illness, and she ended up in intensive care last week, where her body finally ceased to support her. She had come to Australia from Africa, looking for a better life, and with no family here, the small circle of friends that she had formed during her short time in this country will celebrate the passing of her life later this week.

I had to compartmentalise letting this news sink in, with a weekend that was jam packed with things that 'had' to be done, and so I've spent the night here tonight, playing Joni Mitchell, and softly walking around in slow circles, thinking, praying and wondering at it all.

In the past nine months since I turned 34, it seems as though there have been more grave illnesses and deaths in the small social circle that I call my own than there had in all of the 33 years proceeding my birthday. It's meant that I've clawed my way a little more firmly out of the pains and quirks of my own illness, and it's meant that I've deepened my appreciation for this finite fleeting thing that we call one human life.

It's opened my eyes to how little I know about the people who're around me - often I'm finding out more about the person through the eulogy than I had ever had the chance to understand through three years of morning tea water-cooler conversation, while jogging together around a netball court, or through being a 'friend of the family'. Once upon a time these would have been people in my village that I had intimately known, and grown up with from birth. Now, with disposable jobs and marriages and locations in different countries, with our firm sense that it's only 'Now' that matters, these whole human lives gets squeezed into the finite moments that we spend with each other, before we're off in a different direction in life once more.

Out of all this, I seem to have become short-term dependent upon Latin Mass. It's via this liturgy that I find parallel to some of the Bardo Thodol practices, calling the rememberance of and requesting the blessing of grace for the departed, as well as for those who're ill and in need of help. We ask for a place of comfort, light and peace for them all. Three times through this Mass do we bring forth the soon long since forgotten presence of the departed, to our minds, and hold them there, in memory of the path that they have lain before us, with the intent to cherish and care for what they have left behind.

I've called my connection to this Mass 'biological' before, but maybe a closer word is 'organic'. The Tridentine Mass was written in a time where life was, perforce, lived in a far more organic way. The death of people around us would have been an everyday, accepted and understood implication of living our own lives. As I've watched loved ones come to terms with the loss of people that we'd never thought we'd be living without, I'm inspired to push my own life back onto a much more organic path.

A path that cherishes the moments I spend with every person I'm blessed to cross paths with, a path that is not so obsessed with the detail that I miss the grace of those who are present, a path that is hopefully lined with a bit of forethought about the fact that I may never, ever, get to speak to every one of these people, like ever, again. It sheds a new light on asking 'how ya doin?' for sure.

Memento etiam, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum qui nos praecesserunt cum signo fidei, et dormiunt in somno pacis. Ipsis, Domine, et omnibus in Christo quiescentibus, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis, ut indulgeas, deprecamur. Per eudem Christum Dominum Nostrum.

Notes To Self

Making the grand, sweeping assumption that I, you know, have one.

Note #1

Based mostly on self-observance, research into a relationship between twilight blues & difficulty in waking/ early morning waking as a function of temperature & wind changes and histamine level responses during sunrise and sunset might be warranted. Surely someone else has already investigated this?

Further noted that elderly folk and the mentally ill in high-care establishment exhibit exaggerated responses to these changes in light. Ancestral echo, or something a little more biological, perhaps?

Note #2

Requirement for models of systems that value relationships between items, rather than attributing an intrinsic value to the items themselves. Requirement arises not so much because application is required, rather I'd like to know how the approaches work (presuming, of course that there are some, beyond weighted network analyses).

Note #3

 Necessity is the mother of invention. I'm an avid, addicted runner. In avidly, addictedly running around the local streets, I've twice now run into a young (from all appearances) Muslim lady, also out for her evening run, with a headscarf made, from all appearances, out of the same lycra material as her leggings. Who says tradition is inflexible and regressive? 

Note #4

Speaking of regressive, so here's me, proclaiming that there might be something in this Christian monastic life thing, if we could hold back the cultural reactivity just long enough to have a look at the territory, the benefits of it. And here's a terribly generalised, but not so uncommon response: 'You're Christian? Oh. So, you must be regressive, right-wing, conservative AND fundamentalist, right?' (add askance eyebrow and a curled upper lip). It seems it's cool to want to integrate the teachings of Buddhist monasticism into life-as-we-live-it, but Christ-centered convent life? Who'd want that? 

So the note to self is to work on marketing techniques. An attempt to live the values of charity, humility, discernment and reconciliation with the Divine through reverence to others just doesn't, quite frankly, cut the mustard over and above deep seated cultural cynicism.

Maybe the deeper question is why do I want anyone else to think that the idea is attractive? Hmm.

On the Assumption of Our Blessed Virgin Mary

Today in the Tridentine Calendar we celebrate the Assumption of Mary with the Blessing of the Herbs and Fruits:

Deus, qui virgam Jesse, Genetricem Filii tui Domini nostri Jesu Christi, hodierna die ad cælorum fastigia ideo evexisti, ut per ejus suffragia et patrocinia fructum ventris illius, eundem Filium tuum, mortalitati nostræ communicares: te supplices exoramus; ut ejusdem Filii tui virtute, ejusque Genetricis glorioso patrocinio, istorum terræ fructuum præsidiis per temporalem ad æternam salutem disponamur. Per eundem Dominum nostrum.

O God, who on this day didst raise up to the heights of heaven the rod of Jesse, the mother of Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, that through her prayers and patronage Thou mightest commu-nicate to our mortality the Fruit of her womb, Thy Son: we humbly pray that by the power of Thy Son and the glorious patronage of His Mother, we may be so affected by the aid of these fruits of the land as to proceed from temporal to eternal welfare. Through the same Jesus Christ.

Prune ye lavenders and rosemaries, indeed.

Part, in fact, most, of my love for Catholic Liturgy can be traced to a veneration of Mary, to whom, at the end of most services I have attended, we extend prayers of thanks for her intercession - the Angelus, the Hail Holy Queen, the Salve Regina, all of these, where we ask 'pour forth, we beseech thee O Lord, thy grace into our hearts', in the way that we're given to understand that Mary pronounced her fiat, 'Thy will be done'.

The five dogmas - the Virgin, the Immaculate Conception, the Mother of God, the Assumption into Heaven and the Mother of the Church, all these mantles, and the Co-redemptrix, and Mediatrix, still to look forward to. A crown of stars, standing on the moon, adorned with the sun.

Ave maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Bottle

I've been reading about generativity, and generativity's link to care, experienced in humans, usually in middle age. More than one commentator points to the fact that generativity, which is usually defined as:

'the ability of a self contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate or produce content without any input from the originators of the system'

can stimulate virtue or vice, and not necessarily one at the expense of the other. That is to say, we each can generate good intent and good outcomes in the world, or we can act in, well, in the way of Stavrogin in Dostoevsky's 'The Possessed', or we can sit in a nicely painted beige mediocre, or any combination of these. In any case, a path of development is discernible within the outcomes of our actions, where we get back more than we give to the means by which we are giving. What we care about, what we attend to, for good or bad, matters a helluva lot.

I'm always more than a little hypnotised by paths of development. Paths of development can go in many different directions. The Doug Anthony Allstars, Australian Anarchists of the late 1980's, had a somewhat haunting song called 'Bottle'. There's a development, here. Blessed be the person who finally puts a proper DAAS version of the song on YouTube (there's a somewhat shocking solo by Paul McDermott available online to date).

BOTTLE

A stinking sun burned me awake,
Through the shuttered windowpane.
I recalled through the eyes of claret red,
He had taken me again.
And the hair of the dog revives me,
But I find it hard to swallow.
It's a marriage made in heaven between me,

and the bottle.

A thousand words fell through my hands,
And the room just spins.
This sodden mattress holds my heart,
And it cradles my regrets.
I'll read it once again,
For he knows that I'll not follow.
It's a marriage of convenience between me,

and the bottle.

Now king alcohol comes back,
With his static and his pride.
And he staggers, drunken skinful,
Through my throat all parched and dry.
And if I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Then I could rest,
And never wake again in sorrow.

It's a marriage on the rocks, between me

and the bottle.

Love

Terce - the third hour by Roman reckoning

Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Sext - the sixth hour by Roman reckoning

Love does not come to an end. But if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail; or the gift of languages, it will not continue for ever; and knowledge – for this, too, the time will come when it must fail. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect. In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:8-9,13

None - the ninth hour by Roman reckoning

Over all these clothes, to keep them together and complete them, put on love. And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, because it is for this that you were called together as parts of one body. Always be thankful. Colossians 3:14-15

Shemael.

In preparation for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Sourced from: http://www.universalis.com/today.htm

On the Feast of The Transfiguration of our Lord

'I do not exist without this'

There's a thread, a fine ball of

spider's web

buried

deep within the dark whorls

of me.

Summonsed on the sweet balm of incense

Adjured by Bach in the fourth

Transfixed,

dancing,

re-turned, up

unto thee.

OK, so forgive the pithy poetry. I'm (ineptly) trying to describe how lost, how absolutely annihilated, my over-achieving Type A self gets when I attend Latin Mass. I'm not talking uprooted, I'm talking shredded, as though I could take everything I have worked for, sought, kept and discarded in my life and fling it off, far from my very being. The Florence Farr quote comes to mind:

'I stood naked in a bleak and dark eternity, and clothed it in my exaltation.'

Standing anywhere naked is probably precisely the last thing that I should be inspired to do at the cessation of an ultra-conservative Tridentine liturgy, but I've never been one for walking the well defined, amply lit, path. So, anyways.

What is going on here?

There are some easily identifiable draw cards - a rite that speaks to mindfulness, memory of the departed, and a call and response to the soul and the spirit of the Other - not just 'peace be with you', but 'peace be with your spirit'. There's the priest's communion where he (yeah, he) asks 'What return shall I make to the Lord?' a space where inner dialogue is modelled, and accomplished.

There is actual time taken with Gregorian chant, where one word may wander all over the octave, the Latin language where one word may do for five English ones. There's aliteration, a close personal favourite - 'Dominus Deus', 'Saecula saeculorum', 'Spiritum sanctum', 'dilexi decorum domus tuae'.

Perhaps my response is partly the rebellious me - I feel that there is something in the post-modern demand to be 'present in the Now' which seems to mean that we have greater tendency to completely overlook our intergenerational presence. We exist 'saecula saeculorum'. World without end. The power of connecting me to my ancestry through Latin Mass lies precisely with the future that the relationship demands that I face, 'world without end'. There have been moments in the last eighteen months where I have sensed absolute excavation of all of the usual 'fronts' that I dress my human self up with, each day a different character, via my presence in these services. A sort of stripping of my non-essential elements to remind me precisely of my purpose, here on our merry little planet. Which is to take care of what is here, unto the ages of ages. World without end.

Transfigured. Somewhere between Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophet, the Dead and the Living, somewhere there, our Christ selves, clothed in white, speak to us through the message of an Angel, the wings of our thoughts.

Spirit descends upon us, but our soul is what makes us arise, always and everywhere, there, but really, here.

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Til now, I hadn't known that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is one arm of his philosophical system, presented in his 1817 'Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences'. The Encyclopaedia has three stages - Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. Logic grounds the two Philosophies, by showing that any judgment, any claim of an acting agent, implies a reference to Spirit's self-realisation. The Philosophy of Spirit itself is divided into 'subjective Spirit', 'objective Spirit' and 'absolute Spirit'. Phenomenology of Spirit is a component of the subjective Spirit section and is devoted to a systematic account of consciousness.

Anyone sensing an emanatory vibe, Empyrean style, right about now?

Phenomenology of Spirit is the most influential of Hegel's works, and has the structure of a novel, where Spirit embarks on a journey from naivete to maturity. Hegel has a particular view of human subjectivity - as arising as a retrospective self-understanding of our own historical development. When 'Spirit comes to know itself', our nature as retrospective self-knowers is accepted, and achieved.

I'm reading a Cambridge introduction to Hegel. I plan on summarising the juicy bits here.

So, from the chapter on 'Knowledge':

Encountering the external world, modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant sought to show how a conscious subject is entitled to infer that his own sensations amount to knowledge of an external world of objects. Kant is kind of famous for identifying (via Strawson) that 'reality is supersensible and we can have no knowledge of it'. The point of idealism is not to assert or deny external reality so much as it is to give a new account of authority, an authority that depends on rationality moreso than an appeal to God or nature.

Elusive authority was the thorn in Descartes side - from the senses that he couldn't trust, the deceptive nature of his (almost real) dream experiences, and the possibility that the concepts that exist in our minds are the work of an evil demon, his employment of skepticism stripped a layer from the skepticism of Socrates - while Socrates worried about the proper definition of 'friendship' or 'justice', he never questioned whether these were the right words to use when talking about moral reality. Descartes with his 'evil demon' suggests that these concepts, themselves, actually might be entirely displaced.

Descartes. Still no Hegel. Hmm. Where is Hegel in this Introduction to Hegel?

None, the ninth hour in Roman reckoning

Although she is alone, Wisdom can accomplish everything. She deploys her strength from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things for good. Wisdom 7:27,8:1