I have rarely read as considered an approach to the nature of discourse as the one you structure with the premise that the act of surrender can be as much attuned to an individual’s reasoned and balanced life as the act of weighing choices against a fiercely individualistic perspective. Would that conflicts be forced to pass through an appreciation of the freedom to view oneself as within a structure as well as the freedom to stand apart from any theory, society, or perspective before any of us are confident in our reductiveness.
I like the last point you made. It can be very difficult to have a nuanced perspective on this that simultaneously takes into account the structure we are in and our own good. We often either sacrifice our own good for a greater whole or ignore the greater whole for the sake of ourselves. I agree with you though that balancing these perspectives would be the ideal way to make decisions.
I agree with Deborah too. In my own words: "If we were less self-absorbed there'd be a lot less problems" I think that's also a relevant theme in your piece here.
Hi Leanne! Thank you for this comment. I try to phrase my point in a complex way so those who are not familiar with surrender can see the value of it step by step. But to be honest if you have a feel for simply surrending to Life, I also agree it doesn't get much more profound than that.
“I try to phrase my point in a complex way so those who are not familiar with surrender can see the value of it...” I think you accomplished that! People get triggered by the word surrender (in cultures of systemic oppression) so I ended up “rebranding” surrender under other names 😂 keep up the great work!
I'm happy to have stumbled onto your 'Stack! You and I might've overlapped briefly at UCR. I think you and your brother arrived the year I was on my way out. (I'm finishing up a dissertation under the direction of Erich Reck.)
I have a keen interest in our receptivity — one of my projects is to articulate and argue for its misunderstood significance in Kant — so I'm pleased to read a meditation on the theme.
I have a friendly addendum. You've presented two ways of understanding freedom. (Well, that's one way of reading it.) There's being liberated from unchosen constraints in order to create yourself in your own reasoned image, and there's reasonably surrendering to something greater than yourself in order to realize yourself in it. The "somethings greater" you discuss in your post can appear quite big or grand, and at one point you mention one's binding one's will to "one's entire social and natural context." But as your closing examples show, they need not be so.
Indeed, as a certain tradition has it, you might find yourself in your family, your neighborhood, your church, or your woods, for example, but very rarely will you find yourself in your nation-state, the free market, some global order, or humanity writ large. (Plato's ideal city is, after all, a city-state.) Not that the latter are necessarily uninspiring things. It's just that they can be frustratingly abstract and distant — a will bound to them can feel bound only tenuously, so almost pointlessly. According to the tradition I have in mind, it's surrender to the thicker, more local, more tangible attachments that cultivates the transcendent realization of your freedom. (Think, for example, of the nature and function, according to Confucian ethics, of ritual respect toward one's family.)
That is such a funny coincidence. It is a small cyber world I guess. I do remember going to a happy hour during my first year where someone leaving was being celebrated. If my memory serves me correctly I think this might have been you (though to be honest it often does not serve me correctly).
Either way, it is great to connect with you again! And this is very good feedback. I think Wittgenstein is right that philosophers have a "craving for generality" and this can become dangerous when that craving leads to abstractions that we cannot locate in our immediate experience. Then our theory loses the ability to put its feet on the ground, which is very important. So I think you make a great point that it might be helpful to consider how we can surrender to contexts that are more immediate and concrete and that we feel an immediate emotional connection with. In real life, this spirit of surrender always atleast begins to flower at the local level in my experience too. I did kind of realize this at the end and this is why I put in those examples but I did not consider it as a general suggestion. So great feedback. Thanks!
After I submitted my comment, I wandered around in some of your other posts. It became clear to me in reading your piece on Plato's forms that you already had something of an appreciation of the point I was trying to make, or at least an appreciation of a nearby point. So then I felt a little foolish having written the comment!
You explain Plato's forms as being philosophically discernible and appreciable by looking within or into one's ordinary situated experience, not beyond it. They're not supposed to be mysterious or otherworldly. I too think that's the right way to explain them. (Probably not coincidentally, given the professors we studied under.)
The tradition I was speaking for in my original comment would probably bristle against any suggestion, though, that the things appearing in our ordinary situated experience are but conveyances or indications of the true objects of eros and surrender, e.g., the forms. (That suggestion might be one lesson the Symposium is meant to impart.) The tradition I have in mind would balk at the idea that, say, our spirit of surrender begins to flower in our commitments to the particulars in our lives but is only in full bloom when focused on something (more) universal.
I might be drawing a distinction that makes no real difference, but the tradition I'm giving voice to here would, by contrast, see the particular people, places, or things in our lives as the true objects of care and surrender because those particulars are the particular embodiments of value they are. That is, not just any conveyance of value will do: we bind our wills and surrender to embodiments of value, not simply to the value they embody.
Now I don't know what to think about this tradition. Like what would its account of God be, for example? You might think Jesus, for example, is important because (among other reasons) he's God embodying Himself in a necessarily particular human form. Jesus is an object of love because he's God, embodied — we are to love and receive him, because in loving him and receiving him we're loving and receiving God. But, presumably, God unembodied would be just as worthy an object of love, no?
Just some more scattered thoughts. Thanks for replying, and I'm sure we'll meet again in the comments!
These are great questions. I cannot resist sharing my two cents as this relationship between the universal and the particular is a lot of what my research focuses around. I think you might have been on the money when you say that this is a distinction without a difference, at least in the absolute sense. I think this distinction between the universal and a particular instantiation is only helpful when we have missed the mark so to speak, and are trying to get back on the mark.
So to give a concrete example, let's say, I, as a particular member of my family, have missed the mark in terms of embodying the universal Good of the whole family. In order to try to get back to that mark it would likely be helpful for me to consider what norms and principles would allow for the flourishing of the whole family as independent, abstract principles that I can aspire to embody. However, when I actually align with those universal ideals, then the distinction dissolves, as now I understand that these universal ideals only have concrete reality through the way they are embodied in particular individuals living out this truth in their day-to-day lives. This fully embodied universal that only has concrete reality in its particular manifestations is what Hegel discusses as the concrete, rather than the abstract universal.
Maybe this is what the tradition you are referring to has in mind? We need to be careful of about always holding these universals up as metr abstract ideals (though I do think there is a place for this as I mention above.) I am by no means an expert on Christian theology but as far as I understand it this is the ideal of Jesus. Jesus is a kind of example that teaches us how God can be, and in fact is, fully embodied and manifested in the totality of our humanity. This, we find that we do not need to hold up some aspects of our humanity as divine and others as profane. Was Christianity the tradition you have in mind?
The tradition I had in mind wasn't necessarily Christian, but was a small-c conservative tradition that begins — as you sensed! — in Hegel and ends up uniting such far-flung and otherwise opposed recent thinkers as G. A. Cohen and Roger Scruton.
I understand (and agree with!) your way of characterizing the ideal relationship between the universal and particular.
Might we say, then, that as one tries to bring the local and global, or particular and universal, into a relationship of embodiment, one might very well be *oriented by* the universal, but it is the *local or particular embodiment* that is finally and rightly that to which one binds one's will and surrenders?
I think that is fair in many cases. That being said, I would say it is helpful to always leave some room for the universal as a means of critique. As Hegel at least implies though I am not sure if he states explicitly, a good critique is rooted in an analysis that shows that particular members of a system are not oriented towards a common, universal Good that harmonizes them with each other and/or with external systems. So I would be fine saying that we rightly bind our will to the particular, given that the particular does, in fact, continue to sync up with other particulars in a way that manifests a common universal Good. (Of course, it is relevant that this is a conservative tradition, conservatism tends to champion the maintenance of traditional structures and thus traditional particular forms, which is perfectly fine as long as those old structures are still serving us).
I have rarely read as considered an approach to the nature of discourse as the one you structure with the premise that the act of surrender can be as much attuned to an individual’s reasoned and balanced life as the act of weighing choices against a fiercely individualistic perspective. Would that conflicts be forced to pass through an appreciation of the freedom to view oneself as within a structure as well as the freedom to stand apart from any theory, society, or perspective before any of us are confident in our reductiveness.
Hi Deborah,
I like the last point you made. It can be very difficult to have a nuanced perspective on this that simultaneously takes into account the structure we are in and our own good. We often either sacrifice our own good for a greater whole or ignore the greater whole for the sake of ourselves. I agree with you though that balancing these perspectives would be the ideal way to make decisions.
I agree with Deborah too. In my own words: "If we were less self-absorbed there'd be a lot less problems" I think that's also a relevant theme in your piece here.
Omg I love this! I have found surrender (to Life) to be the ultimate act of freedom, that creates profound balance 😁😁😁💗💗💗🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾
Hi Leanne! Thank you for this comment. I try to phrase my point in a complex way so those who are not familiar with surrender can see the value of it step by step. But to be honest if you have a feel for simply surrending to Life, I also agree it doesn't get much more profound than that.
“I try to phrase my point in a complex way so those who are not familiar with surrender can see the value of it...” I think you accomplished that! People get triggered by the word surrender (in cultures of systemic oppression) so I ended up “rebranding” surrender under other names 😂 keep up the great work!
Hi Daniel,
I'm happy to have stumbled onto your 'Stack! You and I might've overlapped briefly at UCR. I think you and your brother arrived the year I was on my way out. (I'm finishing up a dissertation under the direction of Erich Reck.)
I have a keen interest in our receptivity — one of my projects is to articulate and argue for its misunderstood significance in Kant — so I'm pleased to read a meditation on the theme.
I have a friendly addendum. You've presented two ways of understanding freedom. (Well, that's one way of reading it.) There's being liberated from unchosen constraints in order to create yourself in your own reasoned image, and there's reasonably surrendering to something greater than yourself in order to realize yourself in it. The "somethings greater" you discuss in your post can appear quite big or grand, and at one point you mention one's binding one's will to "one's entire social and natural context." But as your closing examples show, they need not be so.
Indeed, as a certain tradition has it, you might find yourself in your family, your neighborhood, your church, or your woods, for example, but very rarely will you find yourself in your nation-state, the free market, some global order, or humanity writ large. (Plato's ideal city is, after all, a city-state.) Not that the latter are necessarily uninspiring things. It's just that they can be frustratingly abstract and distant — a will bound to them can feel bound only tenuously, so almost pointlessly. According to the tradition I have in mind, it's surrender to the thicker, more local, more tangible attachments that cultivates the transcendent realization of your freedom. (Think, for example, of the nature and function, according to Confucian ethics, of ritual respect toward one's family.)
At any rate, I thought this was a lovely post.
Hi Eric,
That is such a funny coincidence. It is a small cyber world I guess. I do remember going to a happy hour during my first year where someone leaving was being celebrated. If my memory serves me correctly I think this might have been you (though to be honest it often does not serve me correctly).
Either way, it is great to connect with you again! And this is very good feedback. I think Wittgenstein is right that philosophers have a "craving for generality" and this can become dangerous when that craving leads to abstractions that we cannot locate in our immediate experience. Then our theory loses the ability to put its feet on the ground, which is very important. So I think you make a great point that it might be helpful to consider how we can surrender to contexts that are more immediate and concrete and that we feel an immediate emotional connection with. In real life, this spirit of surrender always atleast begins to flower at the local level in my experience too. I did kind of realize this at the end and this is why I put in those examples but I did not consider it as a general suggestion. So great feedback. Thanks!
After I submitted my comment, I wandered around in some of your other posts. It became clear to me in reading your piece on Plato's forms that you already had something of an appreciation of the point I was trying to make, or at least an appreciation of a nearby point. So then I felt a little foolish having written the comment!
You explain Plato's forms as being philosophically discernible and appreciable by looking within or into one's ordinary situated experience, not beyond it. They're not supposed to be mysterious or otherworldly. I too think that's the right way to explain them. (Probably not coincidentally, given the professors we studied under.)
The tradition I was speaking for in my original comment would probably bristle against any suggestion, though, that the things appearing in our ordinary situated experience are but conveyances or indications of the true objects of eros and surrender, e.g., the forms. (That suggestion might be one lesson the Symposium is meant to impart.) The tradition I have in mind would balk at the idea that, say, our spirit of surrender begins to flower in our commitments to the particulars in our lives but is only in full bloom when focused on something (more) universal.
I might be drawing a distinction that makes no real difference, but the tradition I'm giving voice to here would, by contrast, see the particular people, places, or things in our lives as the true objects of care and surrender because those particulars are the particular embodiments of value they are. That is, not just any conveyance of value will do: we bind our wills and surrender to embodiments of value, not simply to the value they embody.
Now I don't know what to think about this tradition. Like what would its account of God be, for example? You might think Jesus, for example, is important because (among other reasons) he's God embodying Himself in a necessarily particular human form. Jesus is an object of love because he's God, embodied — we are to love and receive him, because in loving him and receiving him we're loving and receiving God. But, presumably, God unembodied would be just as worthy an object of love, no?
Just some more scattered thoughts. Thanks for replying, and I'm sure we'll meet again in the comments!
Hi Eric,
These are great questions. I cannot resist sharing my two cents as this relationship between the universal and the particular is a lot of what my research focuses around. I think you might have been on the money when you say that this is a distinction without a difference, at least in the absolute sense. I think this distinction between the universal and a particular instantiation is only helpful when we have missed the mark so to speak, and are trying to get back on the mark.
So to give a concrete example, let's say, I, as a particular member of my family, have missed the mark in terms of embodying the universal Good of the whole family. In order to try to get back to that mark it would likely be helpful for me to consider what norms and principles would allow for the flourishing of the whole family as independent, abstract principles that I can aspire to embody. However, when I actually align with those universal ideals, then the distinction dissolves, as now I understand that these universal ideals only have concrete reality through the way they are embodied in particular individuals living out this truth in their day-to-day lives. This fully embodied universal that only has concrete reality in its particular manifestations is what Hegel discusses as the concrete, rather than the abstract universal.
Maybe this is what the tradition you are referring to has in mind? We need to be careful of about always holding these universals up as metr abstract ideals (though I do think there is a place for this as I mention above.) I am by no means an expert on Christian theology but as far as I understand it this is the ideal of Jesus. Jesus is a kind of example that teaches us how God can be, and in fact is, fully embodied and manifested in the totality of our humanity. This, we find that we do not need to hold up some aspects of our humanity as divine and others as profane. Was Christianity the tradition you have in mind?
The tradition I had in mind wasn't necessarily Christian, but was a small-c conservative tradition that begins — as you sensed! — in Hegel and ends up uniting such far-flung and otherwise opposed recent thinkers as G. A. Cohen and Roger Scruton.
I understand (and agree with!) your way of characterizing the ideal relationship between the universal and particular.
Might we say, then, that as one tries to bring the local and global, or particular and universal, into a relationship of embodiment, one might very well be *oriented by* the universal, but it is the *local or particular embodiment* that is finally and rightly that to which one binds one's will and surrenders?
I think that is fair in many cases. That being said, I would say it is helpful to always leave some room for the universal as a means of critique. As Hegel at least implies though I am not sure if he states explicitly, a good critique is rooted in an analysis that shows that particular members of a system are not oriented towards a common, universal Good that harmonizes them with each other and/or with external systems. So I would be fine saying that we rightly bind our will to the particular, given that the particular does, in fact, continue to sync up with other particulars in a way that manifests a common universal Good. (Of course, it is relevant that this is a conservative tradition, conservatism tends to champion the maintenance of traditional structures and thus traditional particular forms, which is perfectly fine as long as those old structures are still serving us).