Phenomenalism, Speculative Realism, and the Place of Emotion
Emotion as Reactive Cognition
Mental health emerges when emotion is recognized as reactive cognition
and Reason is re-situated within, rather than above, the living body’s
participation in universal motion. While the force which permits and
sustains knowledge of reality is faith, the energy by which faith is
upheld, that is, the force which is the keeping of oneself from knowing
one’s Self, is reactivity, or its common name emotion.
Emotion is the
name we give cognitive estimations of a cluster of experiential body
feelings, and an emotion is the name of the representative cluster of
what is presented to knowledge. Psychology would have it that such
clusters are fixed for the frame of being a human creature; mental
health recognizes that even those which are reckoned as fixed are indeed
changing in their presentation. The difference between this presentation
of universal change (what we call experiential) and the ideal of a fixed
human quality is emotional resistance, as the dynamic energies or
experiential fluctuations contained as such is what we refer to as the term
‘emotion’.
We should take some time to elaborate about what is actually
happening here since it seems contrary to what many if not most people
involved with mental health would understand. The energy of the force of
faith is emotion, most often expressed as reactivity. Even what we call
‘good’ or ‘positive’ emotions are reactions. When we really grasp the
sense of this we can talk about it in a few ways, all which have the
same sense: Emotion is feeling cognized; emotion is the cognition’s
appropriation of feeling; emotion is feeling put into concept, and so
on. From here it is not difficult to notice that feelings are sense and
for mental health are the ability to have sense sensibly, which is to
say as known, what we often refer to as wisdom of the body, though this
also gives a certain misnomer to what is actually happening, as I have
and will continue to discuss.
The Body Makes Sense Before Thought
Thoughts ultimately arise due to the body
and are the culmination of the operation that is the body, i.e.,
thoughts are another kind of sense. Ideas and cognitions, however, are
fixations of dynamic processes, so to speak, and occur most often and in
the course of regular living as blunt and abrupt generalizations,
definitions imposed of more subtle layers of knowledge. Modern
scientific experimentation on the brain, for example, only says
something about the modern scientific view of things, the ‘Big’
definition or criterion supposed of all things, since the same activity
is happening in the manner we are posing (through all the layers and
parts) here due to the true sense of the situation being the total
culmination of all that has sense by the body; alternations of the brain
do not change this, as will be exhibited as we go. Real problems have
the potential to arise when thinking is (redundantly) understood to be
“the sense maker” as though the other five senses are but ‘empty’
biological reactions, and that what we typically (again redundantly)
call the mind ‘makes sense’ of them through cognition/ thoughts. What is
actually happening is that the body is making sense and cognition/
thoughts are but one kind of sense that has a functional tendency to
make itself the exclusive ‘executor’ of sense, the hierarchical ‘deemer’
(arbiter) that holds the body together in a systematic structure of
concepts. (I will have more to say about ‘deeming’ elsewhere.) A gentler
and more attenuated conception is available, however, to knowledge. Just
as skin’s sense is touch, an ear’s sense is hearing, and so forth, so
the mind-brain’s sense is thinking. Each sense makes sense and
contributes to what makes sense, and just as an ear does not so much
make sense of touch, nor the nose make sense of seeing (but we could
discuss this), so the mind is not making any sense of anything else; we
can say they are all making sense. A thought is making its own sense,
doing what it does which is of no greater or less importance than any
other aspect of the body that makes sense. The mind-brain does not
‘coordinate the senses’ as much as one is oriented upon that idea to
make sense of the situation; whatever is ‘proved’ is, likewise, but a
particular sense. So it is when I say “emotions are the feelings
cognized”, what I am saying is that emotion is the
cognition/thought-sense of feelings, doing its function of “thinking I
am the executor of knowledge’, just as, for instance, the skin-sense is
touch. Thus, the mind-brain transforms feelings into emotions, emotions
being but a term of cognition and not in the sense of what communicates
in this system that is the body. Oriented only by the mind-brain’s
sensibility is to be separated from one’s Self, as one’s Self is one’s
whole body known as such, inclusive and not subject to Reason’s
exclusive manner of knowing the conventional world, but including it as
well. Mental health can be said thus to be oriented in a greater order
of knowledge rather than a higher order of knowledge. What is greater
includes, what it higher excludes. What is greater acknowledges and
accepts; what is higher incorporates and sorts (denies). To be
effective, we are better to resort to what is greater because it
includes exclusive knowledge; for mental health, which is the category
of the conditions of knowing anything at all, to be discerning is more
effective than dismissing.
Reason, the Body, and the Limits of Cognition
Notwithstanding there is indeed a sense which
works to present itself as the ‘executive’ of all senses, we cannot
reason this in the manner that modern Reason deems ethically proper
because Reason automatically works to deny any reason which does not
comply with its executive authority, so to speak. Another way of saying
this is there is no reason available to the executive reason why reason
is reasonable, so it operates under the asserted assumption that any bid
for reason must comply with its authority. So in the effort to find the
thing that is mental health, instead of relying solely on the truncated
route, we come upon knowledge through its articulation at junctures more
properly sensible which become noticeable under certain conditions and
speak of orientation as the way to further mental health knowledge as
opposed to circling in phenomenalist repetition, the world of subjective
centricity, its eternal recurrence.
Mental Health as an Inclusive Form of Knowledge
For sure this notice of orientation
is not a call to stop the eternal recurrence; it cannot be stopped,
neither in time nor in experience, and for sure often we must meet
people within it and by it. Regardless, such repetition has now allowed
for a revealing of the thing itself (the human being itself) by what it
is doing in the universe. In the same way that we apply knowledge to
empirical (physical) things in the universe, we now have a way to
abstain from keeping ourselves out of the picture, as though we would
need to do something different than we already are —as if we could put
ourselves back in the picture if we think psychology is already
accounting for us by being there by being here— and without a forced
intention. This essay is describing what is already occurring to make
overt and iterable the irrefutable basis of all things involved with
mental health which helps us forward in effectiveness. Mental health is
an inclusive knowledge—one that embraces all knowledge for what it is—as
this is a condition required for true knowing, before the decision of
what to do with it. This, indeed, is what science originally proposes to
do, though psychology, despite its insights, has nonetheless drifted
from the deeper task that science continues to pursue. We can take a
moment now, despite what critical reactions might be arousing, and
recall that this is not an ontological argument. This is not brought up
to be in competition with theories about how everything must fit
together according to the phenomenological empirical method.
Accordingly, we understand modern science is more correctly referred to
as one (of two) epistemological orientation, e.g., the modern
phenomenological orientation. I am not making an argument that its
method is incorrect, only that it offers one type of analysis of things
and one type of product, presents within a certain kind of estimation of
value, and a type of analysis that is useful and can be helpful in the
encompassing explanatory discipline of mental health. Inertia and Mental
Issue Mental issue occurs when the modern justification fails its
function to provide an existential essence, or in other words, when the
lived basis from which ontological arguments find subjective ground has
been compromised, taken a hit, so to speak, and the person’s faith is
disrupted such that the truth of existence is revealed experientially,
as the lived experience against the mere idea of it, the effectiveness
of knowing knowledge known. Still another way of saying this is as the
person is exposed to encountering the arbitrariness of their
subjectivity, the emotional ‘glue’ that holds together the semantic
world of reality in faith, weakens. The arbitrariness is a condition of
inertia, and this is not a simple creative imagining or a meaning
making, but what must be the case if we indeed function within the real
known world and with real things that arise to affect us despite what
meaning we have of them. For example, no matter how semantically
creative we are in the phenomenologically postmodern way, at some point
we are right and validated to admit that subatomic particle colliders
exist and are involved with things that somehow must be real even if we
think they are based in some sort of fantasy or mass-delusion, like
bacteria was at one time, tooth plaque, or radiation. If we do admit
those as real, no different than, say, the tree branch our head strikes
because we didn’t see it, then we also must extend credence to
fundamental principles which explain experienced phenomena, for
instance, gravity and inertia. At some point we must agree that human
beings and individual people are not separate from the operating of the
universe. But this is not mere making of meaning; indeed, we often admit
that we are able to think and believe anything we want, including making
things up and living in our ‘own realities’ in order to find a certain
sense of things and comfortableness as we live our lives, but if we are
indeed involved in the venture and attempt to find out what is really
going on, what we could say are fundamental principles of mental health,
then we also must say that we are moving in accordance with the
universal motion. The idea of inertia has been tossed around in many
areas, and Bart Zantvoort (2015) offers a nice exploration of these from
the strict conventional orientation. He does well to try to insert a
more substantial ideal into the positivist-critical polemic that the
social convention regularly entertains, suggesting that the
philosophical community might be more inclusive and less myopic in its
epistemological assessments. I like his attitude. From a similar stake I
notice the Nonphilosophical position described by Francois Laruelle
which opens mental health unto its own disciplinary domain, one that is
not entirely contained by the conventional arguments. It is interesting
to note how often philosophy delves into psychological dynamics, talking
about philosophical things and psychological things as though they arise
in the same domain and perhaps even are just different ways to talk
about the same thing. But what is this same thing? I say indeed they do:
they are talking about the same thing but this thing is not communicated
in the social convention to be returned in the same state as when it
left; the phenomenological assumption is that it should (think Emanuel
Levinas’s work), the communication should return information which
reflects the same state of when it left so that we can consider the
difference, what we call other people’s opinions but also the changing
state of physical things. So as I here shine a light to show that tight
correlation between reality and phenomenalism, I am reminded of Donna
Haraway and Karen Barad, this kind of intersectional relationship. I say
it is simply what it does: reality, which arises to accord with the
method derived by the conventional orientation. I then go further to
propose that we have access to what is true of reality, but that this
Reasoning (truth) does not fully reside in reality but accounts for it
Nonphilosophically. While Zantvoort offers the philosophical question of
a positive or critical approach upon knowledge as an ephemeral point of
contention, within its activity is a more substantial question. Namely,
if we are not separate from the universe, what does this mean? If we
have access to the universe, how can it be so? And ultimately, what is
knowledge? Immanuel Kant, of course, merely says we can’t know and don’t
have to worry about it because we have Reason, yet, this answer also
supports a sense of the spiritual, such as connecting with a universal
consciousness. Then despite its original reasoning, the philosophers
purported through the 20th century that the subject of this reason is
self-contained, which left the question of access, which reminded us of
the scientific method, which then beckons us now to ask how could it be
possible for only some of us, indeed by using a method that only a
select few are ordained to know how to use. It is as though the sense
that is corralled by this particular kind of Reason is sufficient to
grant the connection with the universe, but without it having to account
for the actuality of the universe itself nor the reason why only by its
method are we able to connect; as I say, it is a kind of permit or
license for activity which then consolidates into a method, i.e., modern
subjectivity on one hand and modern science on the other. It is like a
Shell Game with only two cups, and we never find the ball no matter what
we choose and against all odds.
Phenomenalism and the Limits of Modern Reason
The Greek philosophical lineage,
however, from which the Western philosophical traditions largely reckon,
capitalized on this licensure to yield the great systems based in this
Reason, of which arguably the most renowned is Hegel’s. Soren
Kierkegaard is best known for his attempt of ‘anti-Reason’ (which 20th
century Existentialism conflated in concert with a bid for
irrationalism), but alas, he only had access to the one Reason —his
concept of dread begins to make more sense when we see he had no
recourse to another Reason; he had only a figure of Christ (one hundred
fifty some years later, Francois Laruelle elaborated the end of this
tradition as it appears as an opening in his book Future Christ).
Husserl then pushed into this clipped-off vein the systemization of
material polemics we call Phenomenalism, and with assistance from his
student, Heidegger, the critical route of “deconstruction” (which
pointed toward the irrational while consuming it) soon became the
methodological standard of philosophy. Some recent authors have noted
this standard in the apparent academic practice of finding holes in
other people’s systems and putting forth new ones, philosophy as an
activity of the comparison of semantic systems, I now label
conventional. The significance I point out now is that it works for
society. Nonetheless, through this process (but not quite), we have
found over and over that no such arguments ever yield a successful
connection with the universe beyond subjective meaning, the defaults of
which Foucault exposed, which then also amounted to the material with
which the existential postmodern theorists, such as Deleuze and Derrida,
explicated to its ends, as well as giving us the Reason why the ends are
not recognized, i.e., discourse and psychology. Today, mental health is
still subject to psychology, and psychology, which, as I discussed in
parts 1 and 2, is merely the phenomenological science of subjectivity
implied into the management of social people (the person itself is left
out). To revisit the philosophical paradigm of the last 300 or so years,
phenomenalism is the name of an apologetic lineage of a certain kind of
epistemology which excludes the person for the sake of an allowance for
justified exploitative activity. However, as we see now, it is merely
explaining a certain manner that human beings go about their business of
being human in general. In short, we find there is no changing
humanity’s activity, there is only the changing the particular framing
of ideas by which humanity operates within any temporal frame; we call
this ideology. The appearance that humanity can be changed is thus
rightly called phenomenalism, because when the idea remains (the idea
fixee) that humanity can be changed, sorted, and aligned with that
common ideal, what is left to observation only appears since the
phenomena now given to knowing never consistently complies with the
thing itself. This is what Kant gave us without knowing it, the way to
justify, to make it ok to not worry about the thing itself; he opened
the door to the possibility of a unified empirical science. Ironically,
by creating his propositional method as a way to subvert superstition,
he created a new way to be ‘superstitious’. This then steps into
history, mythology, and paradigm estimation of time, because an
intrinsic mythology (religion and so forth), does not see itself as a
superstition, since the ‘superstition’ is indeed informing for its
moment what reality is. There is no way to prove a superstition is false
because, as many philosophers have explained here and there over the
last couple centuries, the terms of proving it false serves to verify
the meaning of the terms of the functioning ideology which is supplying
an intact reality. Psychology works in the realm where the differend
(see Jean-Francois Lyotard) operates but without acknowledgement of its
presence, it thereby can be said to be a way to reinforce the modern
ideological organization. Presently we are in the moment where the
ideology has developed, and the current generation is fully invested in
it, so it is the time when its edges, parameters, and contours also
begin to appear. Our modern scientific system relies upon while
promoting a person being not connected in any way to the universe except
through social argument. The social argument is the connection to the
universe. It is a methodological assumption that people cannot know
their connection to the universe beyond their own subjective meaning,
which is referred to as phenomenology; spirituality is a type of
phenomenology, a contained system of meaning, and this containment
beckons assurance in others by necessity of the organism. The irony is
tragic against ideological contours, as the various expressions of the
existential condition fall into the bucket of the potential for mental
problems. So I say that the conventional method will indeed function to
provide analysis and doubt, even into solutions that at once sadly
reveal more problems, but twice grant to celebration of feeling like
humanity is progressing in understanding, but we no longer have to only
speculate and make guesses that repeat the modern folly — even while we
still can be occupied with that drama. This is a staple therapeutic
intention of ACT, but I say by the disclosure of Reason to itself such
knowledge is true, veritable, and as such rightly is called mental
health. Mental health is not entirely contained by (or subject to)
psychology because it recognizes and validates what psychology simply
will make into another problem to solve.
Phenomenological Redundancy
Now, returning to our point, if
we follow the reason of what I am calling Reason (since together they
form the situation, i.e., reason and Reason) through this Existentialist
phenomenological throughline of epistemology, then to make another
argument against it merely argues the same thing —as we note of
Heidegger’s general push. This is all to say that phenomenalism exists
in the eternal repetition of reality, or maybe more precisely said,
reality is phenomenological and cannot be overcome as a way (a route) of
thinking, i.e., modern Reason. This is to show that within the real
world only modern Reason can decide whether anything is allowed to be
overcome and hence nothing is allowed to exist outside of Reason except
as Reason defines it as such. This is what I call phenomenological
redundancy. Denial, apology (defense or excuse), and redundancy comprise
the mechanisms for psychological (ideological) maintenance. For
instance, modern reason places the mind a result of the brain
functioning. If I were to attempt to make an argument about why this is
not the case, that the mind is not generated by the brain, the way I
would have to go about it would be confined by the semantic protocols of
real language and its correlated definitions, and I would be hard
pressed to prove it to anyone, even as I might be permitted to hold such
a belief. Similarly, as we commonly come across in mental health, if a
person is suffering from anxiety, say, they have every reason to
continue suffering even when they are trying not to because the system
of real meaning for them functions to reject any reason which
contradicts what their experience is (denial). This is why building
therapeutic rapport in therapy is so important, yet also why so many
clinicians resort to having the person develop skills, that is, anything
that a person might offer to the suffering person to help is
automatically incorporated into the person’s scheme of meaning; it can
be difficult to breach that ideological firewall, so to speak, so skills
can be a way to get some buy-in by the client, since the greater
psychological world tends to work under an assumption that there is no
Self beyond the (social material) psychological self. Skills are an easy
way to affirm that a person’s psychology is only changeable by
psychological tools, which then can avoid the conundrum that arises when
the therapist must consider that they too are so confined by this
ideological, psychological paradigm. This is an example of redundancy
occurring at many levels. The client gives ongoing reasons why their
anxiety is the way it is and why it is a valid problem, so skills avoid
that problem by having the person do something else which then validates
that the person’s apology for their conditions, that indeed their
anxiety is not merely ideological. Nevertheless, we don’t have to know
exactly by what constituency such a communion is, say between the mind
and the brain, since it is all subject to interpretation, even while
this is delimited a priori by the social convention of modern science
and its authority (ideologically contextualized language). A notorious
example of this is that while math might show beautiful, elegant
processes and balances, scientists still have to translate the math into
semantic categories that already exist. Nonetheless, as we extrapolate
known and accepted general epistemological protocols, to say that if
planets move according to known laws, and these laws trace into areas of
knowledge that we follow (what we generally refer to as empirical
discoveries), then human beings in some way must be confined by these
same forces. We must be. If we are not, as we indeed are permitted to
have any meaning we want, then one of two things is happening. And this
is the end-run of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism; namely (1) that we
are already connected and but have no possibility to know it and so we
are ultimately free to do whatever we want, a.k.a., existential Being,
and are justified in Being this freedom, or, (2) we are not connected to
anything, i.e., nothing. This is the modern paradox represented by
phenomenalism and solved by Phenomenology to present the justification
for suffering and its exploitation. So, if this is the case, then we can
we identify why we cannot seem to find out how this can manifest: it is
due to a particular way of coming upon things, and I have proposed this
is modern Reason. That is the summary of the first two parts of this
essay.
The Object of the Subject
Once we can realize what this means, then it is a simple thing to
find a mechanism with which psychology plays its fantastical games of
sanity and insanity, order and disorder, regulation and anarchy
(dysregulation). The separation between sense as reasoned cognitions and
sense as sensation becomes less sure. And since there is no further
argument to make which does not repeat what has already been presented
to reason by Reason in philosophy, when we stop resisting what is being
presented in front of us we can only recognize that we have found the
case, the thing itself, the object of the subject. We have but to come
to terms with what is happening because of the case we have been handed,
as opposed with synthesizing terms from what is given to psychological
analysis. We have but to open ourselves to the possibility that what has
been a basic assumption upon which psychological concepts have been
built over the last 300 years or so is misconstrued. Indeed, this is
what is happening currently around the edges, from the outside in, since
modern psychology has taken residence on the inside to stir and
aggravate all sorts of unnecessary experiential conundrums. So it is,
this is thus just a philosophical grounding, a gathering, a reckoning,
accounting — indeed an opening and an offering, akin to realizing that
the Sun is not the center of the universe. We remove ourselves —if only
for a moment —from the subjective fantasies of what we would want to see
for the sake of psychological comfort. Indeed, it is the (subjective)
fantasies that most often sustain our lived lives, the unsuspended
reality within which we take our lashes and consolidate our pride and
humility, our anger and empathy. It only takes one moment to notice what
is actually happening, but from there, all healing and growth for mental
health stem, because we then can never forget what is contextualizing
what we know, and this shapes and it is shaped out of our sense of what
is good and right as we proceed from then on. Even the insane do this,
but the rest of us cannot know how they did so; there is no absolute
standard of what is good for ‘goodness’ likewise is subject to The Two
Routes I am offering.
If we cannot go back and yet are always going back, if we cannot (in
good faith) reject here another problematic proposition, then the only
way forward is to understand not merely what we are excluding but that
we want to be excluding, for the repetition is the motion of rejection,
of avoidance, denial, and psychological dismissal. We thus become able
to understand this posture as another (a different) Reason, now based in
the inclusivity of mental health, through an orientation upon things.
Inertia as a Model for Mental Health
Though I am hardly a physicist let alone a scientist; to offer a way
into this other route, another Reason which enjoins instead of parts, I
will briefly describe a basic tenet of conventional physics. Inertia is
derivative of a physical experience, a sensation, if you will, used to
make sense, not a law, but an explanation involved with what we can call
the centrifugal force. Similar to all the formulations and reckonings of
physics, it references feelings or what we might call substantial
experiences of things rather than mere meaningful appearances.
Centrifugal force is the experience of being pushed into something, say,
when riding in a turning car the experience of being pushed into your
seat or against the door. There is no force called inertia; inertia is a
name we give to a persistent regularity in how matter responds to
forces, known only through experience. It is due to the epistemological
intersection of phenomenology and physics that we have an account for
the whole of things, the thing itself, but phenomenology and modern
empirical science want to battle over who is right and which domain is
more enforceable; so it is that phenomenalism, for all its historical
and philosophical attempt at divining an inclusive system, regularly
excludes as much as its counterpart. Our task is to show the bridge that
connects to outside of the mere material-meaning. The force is that your
body wants to continue going in a ‘straight line’. The feeling of the
force is a sort of ‘false’ feeling because what is happening is that
something has gotten in the way of your straight-line movement or
motion; accelerating and decelerating reveals inertia because something
is present to the current of motion, not just the motion (which would be
more akin to a phenomenological experience, that is, the expressions of
discursive definition). What has gotten in the way, oddly, is the
turning itself, change itself, the universe doing what it is. Despite
what you might be wanting to do, your body wants to keep going in the
same linear direction at the same speed, which for all purposes relative
to everything else is exactly stasis. Further, any physical experience
that we have in our body is due to a ‘curvature’ encountering that body.
These same forces occur at the huge level of star-sized mass, all the
way down to just-above atomic level. Below those strange thresholds,
i.e., of ‘too big’ and ‘too small’, so to speak, different things
happen, such as a convergence of physical things into nothingness, or so
negligible there is no term we could use to describe it, or the
interaction becomes so shaped by and contingent to probability that what
we call classical or Newtonian physics fall apart. Classical physics is
a specific linguistic scaling such that meaning can only have meaning
within the scale of representation, not the reverse; it is not that
meaning is the scale, it is that the scale holds the potential for
meaning. The scale of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is shown by the
leaning into the notion of inertia to say that gravity itself is the
experience of a multidimensional curvature in the fabric of the
universe, where things with mass create a curvature. We can even get a
sense of why physics broke away from classical mechanics in that
everything is relative, since, if this is the case, then no instrument
would be able to measure precisely the mechanical case, and such
measures become curves of probability rather than distinct things, which
is to say because the instrument would have to be static. Indeed, we see
here the problem, because even the philosophical notion of hypostasis
reveals a scale of limitation, as this scope must resolve to its own
ability of meaning to have the idea that we make it so by definitional
meaning. As the person indeed is moving with the curvature that is the
inter-activity of the universe, the ideas of reality (existence) tend to
want to move linearly, ‘in a straight line’, that is, according to the
efficiency that the conventional method is based upon, the scale it
measures.
From Physical Inertia to Psychological Inertia
Should we continue in the physical analogy to mental health it
would start to appear more like a subject of psychology is submerging
deeper and deeper into metaphor, as there have been many such analogies
of subjects to quantum phenomena, always stepping thus away from knowing
ourselves connected to the universe back into our personally meaningful
worlds. However, due to the nature of mental health, i.e., the
possibility of things for which no longer upholds a requirement for
continuing sustaining addressings to arguments countering particular
material systems (subjects), the analogies stop. More so the analogies
are more precisely found to their limits, so that worlds can be defined
by their material resources (which in mental health is more or less
psychology) to be known, and thus, within the universe itself that is as
such now knowable itself. The keen reader will see this is not to simply
repeat the existential ability to make new meaning but to find that
ontological arguments (theories of the being of things) are now
comprehensible as their existential dimensions revealing the human being
for what it is truly. Moreover, we do not dispel or negate them by
knowing of them and how they function but verify and validate them in
our noticing: once the notice of mental health has begun and the
difference between ontological arguments and their semantic bases are
stretched, the arguments enact a condition which necessitates the use of
metaphor and analogy to compensate for the argument’s overreach. This
overreach becomes noticeable and often obvious, and the tension then
arises to be put down and away, shoved, as it were, into
methodologically validated theories that thwart the appearance of its
quality of appearance. In short, the revealing of appearances to that of
their mere appearance can only stand so much scrutiny before they give
way. To notice this is to begin to realize that no person has a
‘qualitative inertia’ or “metaphorical momentum” except through that
kind of asserted denial of what is happening. Whatever we want to call
it, whether phenomenological denial, the subjective loop, or the
existential revolt, the result of the notice is the finding of something
one once thought moot, unspeakable, or simply void. The reactivity then
decides. The simple awareness of this allows for a genuinely intentional
movement forward in knowledge and understanding. The psychological
forces thereby become explainable (reasonably revealed) by universal
forces because humans are not ever separated sufficiently enough from
the universe to have any essential “personal opinion” or
“misunderstanding of things”, this in contrast to the socially exclusive
ideological forces of existential analogy. Together we find the truth
where reality is not negated for what it offers. The difference between
global and local explanations is the difference between market forces
and cultural norms where the difference between what is happening and
subjective ideas is the ability be afraid of oneself and to believe what
the fear conjures to meaning, what Kierkegaard explored as living in
despair, which is the will to will to be one’s Self. Whatever semantic
(internal) conflict might be noticed thereafter, it is the subject in
the attempt to retain or regain semantic coherence and continuity, the
tension within the subjective semantic existence expressed internally as
a desire for “moving forward without resistance”, i.e., Existentialist
freedom from (extended) culture, which is to say, oddly enough, even
while the existential universe is still in motion, and the motion
itself. The experience of knowing the knowing —knowing knowledge known
—is the difference which recognizes the odds between the modern subject
and the object in-itself. This is also a notice of a difference between
static Being and dynamic Being. The former characterizes the modern
subject, the latter the universal object, the former part of the latter,
retaining its ideal of stasis while being accounted for by the arena in
which it nonetheless moves. This is to say that in the universe the
probability of an object remaining static is a function of the general
inertial forces defined in the local semantic context. The same
relationship exists between cognitions and the motions that stop for
them to be emotions (such that everything is a thought-cognition). This
is repeated everywhere we know things. For instance, it can be said our
Sun does not move in relation to the planets, but in relation to other
galaxies, the sun is moving likewise. This is indeed a simplified
philosophical framing of General Relativity, but when placed into the
frame of a person in relation to the universe, usually the human being
cannot withstand such tremendous forces. The human being has no
epistemological inertia able to contend with its relationship with the
universe; knowledge does not escape, but people (society) behave as
though it does and has escaped — by confining everyone within a
meaningful space from which there is no exit: this is modern Reason and
its phenomenalist existence. So it is when the person is come upon by a
moment that is not confined by Reason, the human being involved with the
possibility of universal dynamics is crushed by Reason. Translated into
the actual experiences of people, relationships (such as the sun to the
planets, the Earth to the Moon, the Earth to the individual person, and
so on) can only stand so much epistemological tension, beyond which
transcendence usually takes over semantically to ‘fill the void’ in
subjective interpretation enforced by psychological phenomenology. By
Reason’s social mandate and imperial insistence into the psychological
world as the person (perhaps as a Super-ego), they literally explode
into ‘too much’ or are shut down into ‘not enough’. The impounding
imperative of Reason is obvious if we want to look. For instance, I can
only bring into and hold in my (mental) perception fairly precisely
around 7, 8, and maybe (big maybe!) at best 15 individual items at once
(not as a sequence, for that is still only holding a few items at a
time); perhaps other people can individuate and suspend more in their
mind, but I cannot. But ask anyone to do the same with 1 trillion items
and the task reveals the inability to actualize the relationship between
the person and 1 trillion things as a knowable feature of experience. Of
course, inevitably, there will be those who will say that they can
indeed hold a trillion individual items in their field of mental spatial
reckoning, and all I can say to that is good for them. At some point,
nevertheless, the person will have to come to terms with some sort of
cognitive, perceptual —whichever term one wants to use — limitation,
and at that point, if they are honest with themselves, they will have to
admit their limitation. It is the same with any motion, the conceptual
capacity maxes out quickly with velocity. We simply cannot perceive and
conceptualize something that is actually in motion beyond a certain
threshold. Though often enough one will not be able to be so discerning
and will argue that imagination and the ability to work with symbolized
abstract concepts denies my point, I would say that person’s rebuttal
only confirms my point I am making here about mental health and
disciplinary discernment. At that exact moment the person develops a
relationship with an idea or a concept of 1 trillion items, not the
actual individual 1 trillion items, the idea is stabilized by emotions
and vice versa and appears to the person as a knowable thing without the
recognition that it is but an idea. For example, I know the galaxy is a
thing due to meaning, but I have never encountered the galaxy itself,
and therefore only encounter the idea of it. In fact, I regularly get
drawn into this idea as though everything is an idea so that nothing is
an idea. Thereby all ideas are equivocated for the modern subject to
mitigate the awareness of the limit of knowledge. For the general
experience that makes up a person, this compensation is further mediated
by ethics (right, wrong, correct and incorrect). For instance, 1+1=2 is
an ethical maxim, and the only way to argue that it is something not
ethical is to use a method which inscribes how people are supposed to
engage with knowledge, i.e., ethics. The only way to argue that
something is not ethical or does not qualify definitionally as an
ethical consideration (say that 1+1-2 is not ethical but mathematical)
is to use an ethical method of definition, a correct way of thinking.
For another, deeper example of equivocation, I have an experience of a
cup because it is there in front of me, I drink from it, and so on, but
I retain the idea that the cup is but an arbitrary semantic of language,
say, the same as the galaxy. I thus do not regularly discern the
difference between the cup and the galaxy in my experience as a feature
of ethical knowing but as indeed merely a fact, maybe even just a
conceptual form, as though all things only exist as conceptual forms,
ideal models. Ethics supports the ‘correct’ difference not only between
actual experience and ideal experience, but between the concepts as
well, that is, between social behavioral morality and the behaviors of
objects.
Kant, Reason, and the Modern Subject
Kant rewrote philosophical license against the
experiential necessity that Hume revealed. This is what Kant received
from Hume: the resentment of being offended at the universe. the emotion is already there being denied in the budding phenomenalist Reason. This is
what Kant’s philosophy reflected: justification of the resentment. Once
the departure from the universe began as an embodied idea, the other
side of this coin is irony, which Kierkegaard (unknowingly) exposed. In
hindsight, Reason is 20/20: the justice founded in resentment became the
industrial wars of the 20th century. The revealing of the mistake of
Reason formed the phenomenalist Existentialist apologies; since the
opening of the doors of conceptualization made by Reason, philosophy has
been the effort to repair the rupture inflicted by the reaction by that
which relies upon the rupture, each which was an overcompensation by
mimicking the model, developing alternating overmined and undermined
synthetic systems of ideas that Alain Badiou called ‘sutures’ (Badiou,
2005). Now, in noticing what is happening, these sutures serve the
epistemological wounds (Kair, 2025; Sawyer, 2014) repeatedly endured in
the epistemology of modern life, and as we see reflected in the
philosophical attitudes of Karen Barad and Lucy Allais which promote
agency over Reason. The given theoretical license thus is distributed in
education such that the developing children only know the world by this
theoretical method albeit implanted as the basis of interpreting
experience. They less meet the world head on, but indeed slam into it
with expressions of imperative assertions. Yet while the prohibitions
(thou must not look too closely; thou shalt not dishonor the Idea)
implicit this phenomenalist method function, nonetheless experience
still functions by the laws of the operating universe, and the
difference cannot be dispelled by Reason, even as it works to repair the
epistemological breaches to its ideological façade. So it is, the
requirement of faith for knowledge to extend into the arena which it
cannot (is not permitted) have access to by the conventional,
Reasonable, route admit of forces which must be said by conceptual
default to determine the subject as a part of the motion of the
universe. The modern subject is not allowed to know the universe itself
without breaches of internal ethical relationships, and only by faith
are such violations redeemed, forgiven, or justified. The motion of the
experience of the modern world is structured into contexts that define
what is ethical. Ethics is justification for truncated knowledge,
i.e. Reason, the methodological rules which permit internal critical
engagement, which in turn carves out ‘the group’ of human beings,
whether originally tribal, subsequently cultural, or inherently
individual, the group organizes around a ‘curvature’ of the senses,
i.e., what is sensible to the group, right and wrong, good and bad,
proper ways, and so forth. Groups then comprise a gathering of literal
mass, not only the physical presence of the bodies, but the physical
forces which allow for the consolidation of the group, as well as the
representation of the present forces in symbols, activities, and so on.
We recall Graham Harman’s objects containing other objects. The basic
epistemological difference between stasis and motion felt as experience
is what we call a ‘problem’ (for our case, mental issue) because the
modern phenomenological Reason is no longer able to be held together in
the ‘proper’ way, or, the way it had been held together to function in
the way it was, that is, the way of Reason. In other words, the
connection between the static representation and the dynamic
presentation is the feeling of difference due to the problem of modern
knowledge as it develops or is manifested as experience. In short, the
universe appears as it is against the subject of Reason, in relief of
Reason, or for a metaphor, as a mirror of Reason. But Reason is the
mirror, yet one that reflects itself, spurning the universe; this is
problem as such, manifested as modern existence. We say that we reflect
on things, including ourselves, and ask about re-presentative meaning;
the psychological implication, though, is that if there is no reflection
then people tend to simply react, do things without really thinking,
what we could even call impulsive or irrational. If something (for our
case, one’s mental health) does not accord with this (ethical) order of
things, it is by the rule of ethics, a categorical ‘disorder’. We see
when limited by the subject that Reason finds only models reflective of
itself, subjects of subjects working to constitute real problems to
solve. Yet, together, i.e., the reason for and the Reasonable disorder,
they constitute the object of the subject, or in our case, the object of
mental health. Similar to a computer drive which can have a partition
such that one side of the drive can be a whole algorithm which functions
to behave as a ‘whole’ computer, or an algorithm which can only
recognize its own processes, modern reality is the world of
phenomenological Reason, an articulation of knowledge that does not
recognize its world is merely a part of the whole computer, so to speak.
Unlike the computer partition, though, which functions in an exclusive
manner, giving no expression that another partition might exist, the
modern (partitioned) existence is filled with indications that the
conventional Reason is porous, despite what it asserts by its
definitional focus. But the general assertion proliferated as a
‘correct’ reality has repercussions. The truth of reality (the whole)
‘leaks’ through the façade of Reason as lived experience. The notion of
orientation thus accounts more accurately what is actually happening.
Due to the conventional method emphasizing its Reasonable way to Be (its
ethics) the ‘leaks’ amount to various types of problems which give
Reason opportunities to justify and maintain itself, the tension
experienced therein, is designated to its own subject, i.e., psychology,
giving rise to the possibility of mental issue. This is not an empirical
account, rather, it is an account of how empiricism functions because it
is known.
Emotion as the Ground of Mental Health
In order to reestablish the proper articulation of knowledge,
which is to say whereby the person articulates knowledge with (modern)
Reason as a subset, humanity first must come to terms with phenomenalism, the
phenomenon of subjective reactivity: emotion.