Unearthing a Natural Transcendentalism: Neuro-Phenomenology and the Poetic Neo-Platonism of the Late Dewey and Husserl

• In Event: The Erotic Reconstitution of Democratic Life: From Socrates to Today

Abstract

Perhaps the deepest contradiction for readers of the Platonic dialogues is between the assertion in the Phaedo and elsewhere that the soul can be nothing other than a pure metaphysical essence entirely detached from bodily existence and the poetic images in the Phaedrus and elsewhere that the soul is at least half a bodily phenomenon: an erotic, poetic accomplishment in time bringing new beneficently erotic things into the world.

Plato’s leaving hints of this personal philosophical evolution, according to Nussbaum (1986), possibly evolved in response to the criticisms of Epicurus and Diogenes: the former denying the existence of the soul altogether, the latter insisting that it is something needing to be brought to light, with a philosophical lamp enabling the accomplishment of transcendence.

Recent scholarship Greenblatt (2007) and Stewart (2014) shows the intellectual “swerve” that brought modernity and modern democracy about to have Epicurean roots. As Stewart trenchantly puts it: “Modernity’s greatest accomplishment was…the ‘euthanasia’ of the soul.”

The erotic re-constitution of democratic life must thus entail the philosophical-poetic resurrection of the soul: the rejection of the Phaedo’s understanding of the soul, and Epicurus’s and modernity’s rejection of that, and the embrace of Diogenes’s and the Phaedrus’s erotically soulful “divine madness.”

The final presentation of this panel will provide an outline of how that can be done.
It will draw first on Nicholas Humphrey’s “neuro-phenomenological” understanding, in his Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness (2012), that the soul is a transcendent creation of evolved nature: a “magic theatre” in humans and many other species through which the preservation of life is made more likely by poetic, erotic attachment to, and dramatic interaction with, its perceived phenomena.

Then it will draw parallels between the newly announced neo-Platonisms of Dewey (1930) and Husserl (1936) offered in response to the crisis of democracy in the 1930s, in particular: 1) Husserl’s late notion of a foundational “correlational apriori,” precisely a magic theatre in which a transcendent “soul” and an immanent “lifeworld” are inseparable dance partners (Luft,2012); 2) the intersections of the late Dewey’s understanding of “transaction” (1949) and the late Husserl’s (1928, 1931) understanding of “empathy” as teachable transcendental logics for the connection of souls through perceptions of bodies; and 3) how the location of the soul, and its poetic growth, in three-dimensional time, as depicted in both Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and Husserl’s Crisis (1970), erects a historical stage of redemptive hope upon which we can all be pedagogically brought to magnanimously act, bringing about what Husserl calls “the phoenix of a new humanity.”

This new cosmopolitan humanity will be soulfully compelling in deeply truthful, deeply beautiful, and deeply democratic ways, and perhaps poses the only means to decisively defeat the false sense of soulful “greatness” to be found in fascisms built on hollow, erotically regressive and erotically limited resentments rather than on the world-embracing philosophical imagination.

Author

• Bruce J. Novak, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning