This is such an inspiring essay, Kurt! I really love it. This passage, which I quoted when I restacked your essay, particularly speaks to me:
"My hope is that I can help you feel your own presence and that of the world more intensely. I believe that experiencing presence can help make everyday life more special and that it can energize you and break out of the everyday dissociation that is a temptation to us all. Presence is life. My plea to you the reader is that you do not allow your presence to be smothered by the mundane when you could choose to assert it, as the torch asserts the flame. This is your birthright. "
So often in today's world, passivity is seen as a virtue. As someone who's very... active?... in their living and thinking, I find your words to be so refreshing.
Some of the essay reminds me of Hannah Arendt's work on Vita Activa vs. Vita Contemplativa. While so much of what you mentioned, like meditation, focuses on withdrawing, like Arendt, I've always found it very satisfying, grounding, and enlightening to, like you said, reach out to reality and orient myself with its beauty (and fearlessly orient myself with its pain as well).
I look forward to more of your work on this matter (and on intuition too).
Thank you for your thoughtful comment and for restacking my essay, Rebecca! You've inspired two thoughts:
1. The experience of presence keeps us from losing ourselves in the vita activa, if I am using the term correctly. It is easy to just work or even to love and play without that extra self-awareness. I suspect that that may be part of the so-called midlife crisis.
2. I think we might be able to liken presence to art. Both are concretizations of aspects of life that we normally experienced as elusive processes. Both are, to use Rand's phrase, "emotional fuel." They are different insofar as art is an artefact, and presence is an experience that is accessible to any reasonably intelligent person. But the similarity is striking.
I like it. It's easy to find one's presence during vita contemplativa-during those quiet, inward stretches of time. It's much harder to keep that presence during the active, which your essay helps to unpack and explain. I think one could definitely liken presence to art, especially because mastering presence is an art form in itself :)
"Mastering presence is an art form in itself." Wow! What an idea! That really gives me something to chew on.
Although I write about music, film, painting, and literature, I do not think of myself as truly creative. I used to joke with my wife that she was fiction and I was non-fiction. Now you are suggesting that I (and I suppose everyone who makes an effort) is creative in a quasi-artistic sort of way. Reminds me of a Facebook friend who said that Sydney Poitier's greatest artistic creation was himself.
But isn't self-creation what presence is all about? We don't merely contemplate ourselves passively; we actively bring a higher-order self into being in the very act of reflective focusing. I haven't figured out the paradox, and maybe no one can, but we are self-created beings. To be fair, it's not as if we go from sleep to the realized self. We have to be alert and partially realized. Perhaps all awareness past a certain age contains an element of self-awareness, however dimmed by a diminished life.
I remember a line from Atlas Shrugged that I like. If I remember it correctly, it says something like "We must all create ourselves in the image of Man." Notice she replaces "in God's image" with "the image of Man." I'm slightly uncomfortable with this, but then, maybe part of our idea of God comes from a projection of presence into the world.
Never apologize for your ramblings- I’m a fan of them :) Maybe it’s the romantic side of me, but I definitely feel there’s an artistic side to cultivating presence because it requires an expansion of consciousness. It requires us to orient ourselves with nature, to seek, to ponder, to grow ourselves, as opposed to boxing ourselves into modern society’s view of what life should represent (which is very much so a one-size-fits-all philosophy). To your point about Poitier, the act of creating one’s self via free will is involved with the art of presence. And I think one can not become more present without “working” on himself, which really does come down to creating within oneself the person you want to become on the outside. You bring up a good point about that.
I agree with you about the image of God. I do think that our own philosophies influence our view of a creator. I’ve always felt far more in tune with divinity in nature, rather than a church. It’s not lost on me that I’ve never subscribed to organized religion, and don’t look at religion or philosophy in a dogmatic way, so in turn, when I search for divinity, it’s the search of a divinity that has my mark on it. To the fundamentalist, that’s blasphemous. To me, it’s beautiful. I’ve Never felt connected to the beauty of Man in a church. I’ve always felt connected to the beauty of Man when I’m surrounded by the beauty of nature because those two are so interconnected.
For Rand’s point, and I know I’m trailing a bit from her philosophy, but I think she found divinity in a similar way. To her, Man is the highest being, that is where she identified “divinity” so to speak, so that is the image, for her, that one strives to honor. To me, divinity is found in literal nature, which is an extension of nature described in Aristotelian terms. Humans, Man, is an intricate part of that nature, and I always feel the divinity of man in an environment full of the very nature he is derived from.
It is interesting how creation, from nature to man, or at least a proper concept of it, may need to be explored in regards to understanding and implementing the concept of presence.
It reminds me of a piece I once wrote in regards to one of my original songs being about those who are beings of, as Rand once put it, “self-made soul.”
What you say about presence requiring us to grow ourselves is a great insight. I was thinking about moment-to- moment experience, but you are right, the feeling of presence, both presence of the self and of the world, creates an opportunity and even a responsibility to grow as an individual.
I am intrigued by what you say about yourself and nature. I'm not sure my feelings for it are as strong as yours, but it is important to me. Some of Stef and my happiest time were spent trail biking, and I collect landscape photography books.
Also interesting is the Rand-nature connection. Rand is so focused on technology that it is easy to forget that she felt a connection to nature as well. I think we see this especially in The Fountainhead. I wrote an essay on the man-and-nature theme in the novel (of course!). Here is the key passage:
BEGIN QUOTE
The climax to the man-and-nature theme is the famous first scene of Part IV, with the boy on the bicycle. It is stressed here, as elsewhere, that nature is not the end for man but a beginning, background and challenge. The boy, despairing of man’s works, is riding through the leaf-filtered light of a spring day as through a vision. He sees a patch of blue sky ahead at the top of a hill, looking like a film of water. He pedals up the hill, imagining that at the crest he will see nothing but sky above and below. What he does see is the Monadnock Valley Resort with its fieldstone houses and its creator, Howard Roark, contemplating it. (Here again Sky, Water and Stone are all associated with Roark.) The sight jars the boy into realizing that not only nature but also man’s works can be beautiful. This scene is a lyrical tribute to man’s power to build on earth:
"There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He [the boy] knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them—as if the centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a road to a goal—and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning."
Read between the lines a little and you will see the novel’s thesis about the relationship of man and nature in a nutshell: Man may have come upon an earth created by “great blind forces” of nature, but he gives meaning to it. We cannot imagine nature as complete without man, and yet man is subtly part of nature. Man's task is to develop nature, not overmaster it.
END QUOTE
I don't know whether she would use the word "divine" though. Too much baggage for an atheist. Of course, she did use the word "soul," she would immediately qualify it by saying that she meant "consciousness." So who knows, maybe she would use the word divine with some qualification.
As you would expect, I don't grant a population of two (self and world) in the fundamental scene of presence. There are three: self, other, world. This other is pronominal and located in self. It is not an abstraction, but ever-present with self. Other is present even when no concrete other is at hand outside one and even when one is not thinking of a particular other brought to the fore in mind. The other always with self is not there with independent mass, but is spatially located, co-located with self, co-present with self in the world. Many think of that other-presence as God. Generally, they take that other as a presence in all the world. I think that is a wrong specification of location and wrong turn by personification of the pronominal other that has been with one since earliest consciousness and self-presence in the world. "The world and you are with me. It and you make and move me. I make and move in the world and you. . . ."
I didn't say much about the presence of other people. I did mention near the end that when two people look into each other's eyes without the intention of using each other, they peer into a deep well of presence. Not much substance, but a good metaphor, I think. I hope to write more on the subject at some point.
It's interesting that you put such emphasis on volume & specifically mass at the core of the presence discussion - which is unusual in these discussions of phenomenology.
I.e I've come across similar essays to this but from all sorts of idealist type pathways, Bhuddism, Heidegger's Deisen etc - none will mention this notion of mass.
That's the heart of the problem and all the anti-physicalism rhetoric, "mass" is a highly abstract notion from physics and quite hard to define (just gets into more abstractions)
I've had debates with the idealists and they end up in circles with different starting presuppositions.8
As an example - much of the presence "concrete" type feeling phenomenology can equally be experienced in Lucid dreaming states.
In the Lucid dreaming world that tree 🌳 looks real, feels real, appears as "other" - even people can appear as "other" and its not like one is aware the content of other characters in the Lucid dream is a product of one's own consciousness.
Sure, there are "symmetry breakers" - one can manipulate the Lucid dreaming landscape in ways one cannot manipulate normal veridical reality.
The point is Lucid dreaming states are quite bizzare in terms of presence - since if anything, one can feel MORE PRESENT, heightened aliveness, greater awareness....but this is clearly quite odd, since in what way does Lucid dreaming have intentionality as in consciousness of X, Y or Z....?
The normal assumption in correspondence theory of truth is consciousness is a representational model process of perceptions acquired from an external reality.
In Lucid dreaming states - what's going on ? Representation of representation as if some meta-representation ?
I can see the temptations of the idealists & dualists in this domain, who give some special status to the consciousness phenomena, making it more fundemental and primary than mearly emergent phenomena.
Thank you for reading my essay, Andie! I don't know much about some of the phenomenologists you mention, but I think Merlau-Ponty would also emphasize mass along with volume. And he was a realist, not a representationalist like Descartes.
I wouldn't get too hung up over my use of the term "mass." I don't mean it in a technical sense, as it is used in physics. I was trying to encapsulate everyday experiences of weight, solidity, inertia, resistance to being pushed, and so forth. If you know a better word, I would be glad to use it. My point is that the basic structure of ourselves and the things in the world that we live in is entitative: we and they have volume and mass. We are just as much bodies as we are minds. In fact, Merlau-Ponty is famous for saying "I am my body."
I have problems with this formulation, because it seems to me to have a residue of dualism, but I see what he means. If you're interested in some of my anti-dualist writing, you can check it out on my old website: www.kurtkeefner.com/post/one-person-indivisible .
I am not sure why you bring up lucid dreaming. It sounds like a variation of Descartes' evil demon or the brain in a vat scenario. I address this in the essay I linked, but my short answer is that a. lucid dreams do not seem like dreams as such, especially in that they do not go on for extended periods, and b. we are not entitled to speak of dreams unless we concede that there is such a thing as a valid, normal, waking kind of awareness.
At any rate, thanks for subscribing. May I suggest that you go back and read earlier essays on this website or maybe check out some on the old one. Do you have a substack or blog I can subscribe to?
This is such an inspiring essay, Kurt! I really love it. This passage, which I quoted when I restacked your essay, particularly speaks to me:
"My hope is that I can help you feel your own presence and that of the world more intensely. I believe that experiencing presence can help make everyday life more special and that it can energize you and break out of the everyday dissociation that is a temptation to us all. Presence is life. My plea to you the reader is that you do not allow your presence to be smothered by the mundane when you could choose to assert it, as the torch asserts the flame. This is your birthright. "
So often in today's world, passivity is seen as a virtue. As someone who's very... active?... in their living and thinking, I find your words to be so refreshing.
Some of the essay reminds me of Hannah Arendt's work on Vita Activa vs. Vita Contemplativa. While so much of what you mentioned, like meditation, focuses on withdrawing, like Arendt, I've always found it very satisfying, grounding, and enlightening to, like you said, reach out to reality and orient myself with its beauty (and fearlessly orient myself with its pain as well).
I look forward to more of your work on this matter (and on intuition too).
Thank you for your thoughtful comment and for restacking my essay, Rebecca! You've inspired two thoughts:
1. The experience of presence keeps us from losing ourselves in the vita activa, if I am using the term correctly. It is easy to just work or even to love and play without that extra self-awareness. I suspect that that may be part of the so-called midlife crisis.
2. I think we might be able to liken presence to art. Both are concretizations of aspects of life that we normally experienced as elusive processes. Both are, to use Rand's phrase, "emotional fuel." They are different insofar as art is an artefact, and presence is an experience that is accessible to any reasonably intelligent person. But the similarity is striking.
What do you think of these ideas?
I like it. It's easy to find one's presence during vita contemplativa-during those quiet, inward stretches of time. It's much harder to keep that presence during the active, which your essay helps to unpack and explain. I think one could definitely liken presence to art, especially because mastering presence is an art form in itself :)
"Mastering presence is an art form in itself." Wow! What an idea! That really gives me something to chew on.
Although I write about music, film, painting, and literature, I do not think of myself as truly creative. I used to joke with my wife that she was fiction and I was non-fiction. Now you are suggesting that I (and I suppose everyone who makes an effort) is creative in a quasi-artistic sort of way. Reminds me of a Facebook friend who said that Sydney Poitier's greatest artistic creation was himself.
But isn't self-creation what presence is all about? We don't merely contemplate ourselves passively; we actively bring a higher-order self into being in the very act of reflective focusing. I haven't figured out the paradox, and maybe no one can, but we are self-created beings. To be fair, it's not as if we go from sleep to the realized self. We have to be alert and partially realized. Perhaps all awareness past a certain age contains an element of self-awareness, however dimmed by a diminished life.
I remember a line from Atlas Shrugged that I like. If I remember it correctly, it says something like "We must all create ourselves in the image of Man." Notice she replaces "in God's image" with "the image of Man." I'm slightly uncomfortable with this, but then, maybe part of our idea of God comes from a projection of presence into the world.
Forgive me for rambling. Lots of ideas here!
Never apologize for your ramblings- I’m a fan of them :) Maybe it’s the romantic side of me, but I definitely feel there’s an artistic side to cultivating presence because it requires an expansion of consciousness. It requires us to orient ourselves with nature, to seek, to ponder, to grow ourselves, as opposed to boxing ourselves into modern society’s view of what life should represent (which is very much so a one-size-fits-all philosophy). To your point about Poitier, the act of creating one’s self via free will is involved with the art of presence. And I think one can not become more present without “working” on himself, which really does come down to creating within oneself the person you want to become on the outside. You bring up a good point about that.
I agree with you about the image of God. I do think that our own philosophies influence our view of a creator. I’ve always felt far more in tune with divinity in nature, rather than a church. It’s not lost on me that I’ve never subscribed to organized religion, and don’t look at religion or philosophy in a dogmatic way, so in turn, when I search for divinity, it’s the search of a divinity that has my mark on it. To the fundamentalist, that’s blasphemous. To me, it’s beautiful. I’ve Never felt connected to the beauty of Man in a church. I’ve always felt connected to the beauty of Man when I’m surrounded by the beauty of nature because those two are so interconnected.
For Rand’s point, and I know I’m trailing a bit from her philosophy, but I think she found divinity in a similar way. To her, Man is the highest being, that is where she identified “divinity” so to speak, so that is the image, for her, that one strives to honor. To me, divinity is found in literal nature, which is an extension of nature described in Aristotelian terms. Humans, Man, is an intricate part of that nature, and I always feel the divinity of man in an environment full of the very nature he is derived from.
It is interesting how creation, from nature to man, or at least a proper concept of it, may need to be explored in regards to understanding and implementing the concept of presence.
It reminds me of a piece I once wrote in regards to one of my original songs being about those who are beings of, as Rand once put it, “self-made soul.”
Now it’s my turn to apologize for my ramblings ;)
What you say about presence requiring us to grow ourselves is a great insight. I was thinking about moment-to- moment experience, but you are right, the feeling of presence, both presence of the self and of the world, creates an opportunity and even a responsibility to grow as an individual.
I am intrigued by what you say about yourself and nature. I'm not sure my feelings for it are as strong as yours, but it is important to me. Some of Stef and my happiest time were spent trail biking, and I collect landscape photography books.
Also interesting is the Rand-nature connection. Rand is so focused on technology that it is easy to forget that she felt a connection to nature as well. I think we see this especially in The Fountainhead. I wrote an essay on the man-and-nature theme in the novel (of course!). Here is the key passage:
BEGIN QUOTE
The climax to the man-and-nature theme is the famous first scene of Part IV, with the boy on the bicycle. It is stressed here, as elsewhere, that nature is not the end for man but a beginning, background and challenge. The boy, despairing of man’s works, is riding through the leaf-filtered light of a spring day as through a vision. He sees a patch of blue sky ahead at the top of a hill, looking like a film of water. He pedals up the hill, imagining that at the crest he will see nothing but sky above and below. What he does see is the Monadnock Valley Resort with its fieldstone houses and its creator, Howard Roark, contemplating it. (Here again Sky, Water and Stone are all associated with Roark.) The sight jars the boy into realizing that not only nature but also man’s works can be beautiful. This scene is a lyrical tribute to man’s power to build on earth:
"There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He [the boy] knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them—as if the centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a road to a goal—and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning."
Read between the lines a little and you will see the novel’s thesis about the relationship of man and nature in a nutshell: Man may have come upon an earth created by “great blind forces” of nature, but he gives meaning to it. We cannot imagine nature as complete without man, and yet man is subtly part of nature. Man's task is to develop nature, not overmaster it.
END QUOTE
I don't know whether she would use the word "divine" though. Too much baggage for an atheist. Of course, she did use the word "soul," she would immediately qualify it by saying that she meant "consciousness." So who knows, maybe she would use the word divine with some qualification.
The quote comes from this essay: www.kurtkeefner.com/post/man-and-nature-in-the-fountainhead
I like it.
As you would expect, I don't grant a population of two (self and world) in the fundamental scene of presence. There are three: self, other, world. This other is pronominal and located in self. It is not an abstraction, but ever-present with self. Other is present even when no concrete other is at hand outside one and even when one is not thinking of a particular other brought to the fore in mind. The other always with self is not there with independent mass, but is spatially located, co-located with self, co-present with self in the world. Many think of that other-presence as God. Generally, they take that other as a presence in all the world. I think that is a wrong specification of location and wrong turn by personification of the pronominal other that has been with one since earliest consciousness and self-presence in the world. "The world and you are with me. It and you make and move me. I make and move in the world and you. . . ."
I didn't say much about the presence of other people. I did mention near the end that when two people look into each other's eyes without the intention of using each other, they peer into a deep well of presence. Not much substance, but a good metaphor, I think. I hope to write more on the subject at some point.
It's interesting that you put such emphasis on volume & specifically mass at the core of the presence discussion - which is unusual in these discussions of phenomenology.
I.e I've come across similar essays to this but from all sorts of idealist type pathways, Bhuddism, Heidegger's Deisen etc - none will mention this notion of mass.
That's the heart of the problem and all the anti-physicalism rhetoric, "mass" is a highly abstract notion from physics and quite hard to define (just gets into more abstractions)
I've had debates with the idealists and they end up in circles with different starting presuppositions.8
As an example - much of the presence "concrete" type feeling phenomenology can equally be experienced in Lucid dreaming states.
In the Lucid dreaming world that tree 🌳 looks real, feels real, appears as "other" - even people can appear as "other" and its not like one is aware the content of other characters in the Lucid dream is a product of one's own consciousness.
Sure, there are "symmetry breakers" - one can manipulate the Lucid dreaming landscape in ways one cannot manipulate normal veridical reality.
The point is Lucid dreaming states are quite bizzare in terms of presence - since if anything, one can feel MORE PRESENT, heightened aliveness, greater awareness....but this is clearly quite odd, since in what way does Lucid dreaming have intentionality as in consciousness of X, Y or Z....?
The normal assumption in correspondence theory of truth is consciousness is a representational model process of perceptions acquired from an external reality.
In Lucid dreaming states - what's going on ? Representation of representation as if some meta-representation ?
I can see the temptations of the idealists & dualists in this domain, who give some special status to the consciousness phenomena, making it more fundemental and primary than mearly emergent phenomena.
Thank you for reading my essay, Andie! I don't know much about some of the phenomenologists you mention, but I think Merlau-Ponty would also emphasize mass along with volume. And he was a realist, not a representationalist like Descartes.
I wouldn't get too hung up over my use of the term "mass." I don't mean it in a technical sense, as it is used in physics. I was trying to encapsulate everyday experiences of weight, solidity, inertia, resistance to being pushed, and so forth. If you know a better word, I would be glad to use it. My point is that the basic structure of ourselves and the things in the world that we live in is entitative: we and they have volume and mass. We are just as much bodies as we are minds. In fact, Merlau-Ponty is famous for saying "I am my body."
I have problems with this formulation, because it seems to me to have a residue of dualism, but I see what he means. If you're interested in some of my anti-dualist writing, you can check it out on my old website: www.kurtkeefner.com/post/one-person-indivisible .
I am not sure why you bring up lucid dreaming. It sounds like a variation of Descartes' evil demon or the brain in a vat scenario. I address this in the essay I linked, but my short answer is that a. lucid dreams do not seem like dreams as such, especially in that they do not go on for extended periods, and b. we are not entitled to speak of dreams unless we concede that there is such a thing as a valid, normal, waking kind of awareness.
At any rate, thanks for subscribing. May I suggest that you go back and read earlier essays on this website or maybe check out some on the old one. Do you have a substack or blog I can subscribe to?