Living With(in) Your Ends: An Approach to a Novel Life

By Kevin Michael Stevenson

Did you ever wonder why you see the world around you the way that you do? Ever wondered why you might see everything in your world as a means to an end? Why should you bother following the dictum to ‘live within your means’ when you haven’t even considered ‘living with or within your ends’? You might ask yourself: what is implied here by ends and by means, and why does the latter always seem to come before the former? After all, how do we end anything without a means for doing so? Living With(in) Your Ends provides a crutch for you to lean on while you ponder the means and ends within your life and the world around you. It guides you on how to maintain your true identity without getting ‘sucked into world of means’ where superficiality prospers.

Investigating human existence through a lens that values the present moment and which provides for practical consequences, Kevin M. Stevenson, PhD, provides an exploration into the deeper realms of perception and their relationships with time and identity. Living With(in) Your Ends not only provides a conceptual map to follow for leading an authentic life, it also considers some of the historical and philosophical notions that have blessed and plagued human existence. Living With(in) Your Ends will provide you with a framework for healthy reflection and increased awareness of the intersections between yourself and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398461789

Kevin Michael Stevenson

Kevin Michael Stevenson PhD was born and raised in Ontario (mainly Burlington) and Marietta, Georgia, living his adult life in Canada, Australia, Spain, Mexico and Ireland. He holds an HBA (University of Toronto), MA and PhD (University of Sofia), and a professional MA (ICHAS), practicing as a counselling therapist as a member of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. He has lectured at the Irish College of Humanities and Applied Sciences and Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick at the Faculty of Education. Kevin has published on philosophy, psychology, political theory, counselling, aesthetics, and education, and is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Philosophy (2021–2024) with Sofia University in Bulgaria. He is an avid painter of what he terms abstract primitive expressionism, and is a singer-songwriter on the guitar.

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About the Author

Kevin Michael Stevenson PhD was born and raised in Ontario (mainly Burlington) and Marietta, Georgia, living his adult life in Canada, Australia, Spain, Mexico and Ireland. He holds an HBA (University of Toronto), MA and PhD (University of Sofia), and a professional MA (ICHAS), practicing as a counselling therapist as a member of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. He has lectured at the Irish College of Humanities and Applied Sciences and Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick at the Faculty of Education. Kevin has published on philosophy, psychology, political theory, counselling, aesthetics, and education, and is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Philosophy (2021–2024) with Sofia University in Bulgaria. He is an avid painter of what he terms abstract primitive expressionism, and is a singer-songwriter on the guitar.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the cities of Lucus Augusti and Ulpia Serdica, without which this book would not have come into existence.

Copyright Information ©

Kevin Michael Stevenson 2023

The right of Kevin Michael Stevenson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398461772 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398461789 (ePub e-book)

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Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria for inculcating within me the motivation required to complete the book in its dissertation form. Dr Alexander Gungov and Dr Vesselin Dafov were helpful in clarifying my ideas and engraining a sense of philosophical direction. I would also like to thank Professor Jesus Varela Zapata of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Lugo for providing advice on my teaching and research. Much gratitude to Dr Alvina Grosu who conducted the Propeller Model Approach to therapy with (or should I say on) me. A special thanks to Aoife for always encouraging me to think about what is best.

Also, the credit for the cover artwork titled The Maze (2003) goes to Kevin Michael Stevenson.

Introduction

This book will propound the notion that the value of the present is a worthwhile notion, activity, philosophy and way of being. It can be interpreted to involve a defence of a specious present¹ which can consider the self as an emergent becoming, thus one that varies in time and taken to be able to absorb the whole of temporal reality, eliminating the past and future.² It aims to be more reactionary to the Modern mindset than anything else. To do this, it will look at the role of the present in phenomenology, ethics, anthropology and therapy. Valuing the present is not a simple act of ‘seizing the day’, but on the contrary, it is about dispossessing or de-objectifying the present. The objectified present is a spatialised present, characterised as a series of now moments with causal chains linking them together, and through its scientism that is free from any sort of time-perspective, the self is automatically taken as unitary and thus mechanistic, because lived time is jettisoned.³ The objectified present can be characterised as deriving from Newtonian physics, in which any range of Cartesian coordinates are to be provided with the possibility of being the basis for measuring and ordering everything and everything’s motion involved in the perceptual world, which has led to the logical formulation of the conceptual thought found in the natural attitude of perceptual experience.⁴

The condition of objectifying the present can be considered found in Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic individual, as such a person lives in dread by being at the mercy of external objectified finite things.⁵

Considering a pure present, alike the one Goethe admired in the texts from the ancient world, fills life with plenitude, symbolised by the Doric column, and represents a negation of time, thus a pure present is against any direction of time;⁶ the present this project aims to recover. This is a value of the present involving a time experience that is lived with a particular intensity, making it epiphanic and contrasting with our ordinary objectified present as static experience, the latter for Taylor is out of joint, dead, or forsaken.⁷ The former conception of time is what Epicureanism and Stoicism can be said to also promote⁸ and which Marcus Aurelius considered in correspondence with a Stoic attitude of attention (prosoche) which directs to the present moment.⁹

This can be considered then a promotion of a Romantic present, and aligns with Continental philosophy’s approach to an ekphrasis of experience or the Umwelt. It considers that Continental philosophy should be considered synthetic philosophy in contrast to analytic. The former can be considered a philosophy which involves an order of nature with a ‘subjectivist twist’, as accessing nature requires a turn on our own expressions of self-definition; a meaningful cosmic order that Modernity has aimed to crush, along with our inner nature, through natural science and a physical universe.¹⁰ The non-objectified present respects not only Peirce’s phaneron, thus the sum total of consciousness’ contents, but also William James’ notion of pure experience, which cannot be objectified.¹¹

Romanticism thus has tenets of human feeling and nature itself to counter the objectified present that involves a world as a mechanism and one that is utilitarian, thus taken as just a mere meaningless field for instrumental reason.¹² It is important to note that this project can be considered as aligned with Modernism (not Modernity), in succeeding Romantic expressivism, both are against instrumental and disengaged modes of action and thought and aim to provide for sources which can restore life with richness, depth and meaning.¹³

The present when perceived as a non-object, can thus provide for a psychic state which involves an experiential transcendence, thus an intensity of ecstasy or rapture that allows us to make death and time disappear as the limits on our senses disappear; this state of ‘losing oneself’ leads to symbolic reordering, transformation of self, and what Mircea Eliade referred to as a continuous present in mythical time.¹⁴ Such an experience of the present will be argued to derive from improvisation and aesthetic experience, which shows that the present can be de-objectified, and that its results are beneficial to our human understanding. Aesthetic experience, deriving specifically from epiphanic art (which represents something directly available), is hostile to the Modern objectified present and even the consumerism of capitalist society.¹⁵

Exploring the manner that painting, for example, shapes our perception cannot be separated from exploring the unthematised pre-objective world, and thus offers the opportunity to de-objectify the present by bringing forth the tacit and subliminal links which construct our ordinary experience, requiring the prevention of the hastily ignorance of fixing what we find in experience on objective instrumental terms.¹⁶ Aesthetic experience can thus retrieve experience and return us to a de-objectified present, as it brings us back to the immediacy of experience and lived reality instead of a conceptualised objectified present.¹⁷ The epiphanic in aesthetic experience thus might hold the key to what it means to be a human without losing itself in subjectivism.¹⁸

We need to orient ourselves to the present to value it which differs from the Modern standpoint of a world in which the emergent is a conditioning and conditioned factor, thus we need to escape from the causal approach to the present.¹⁹ This means valuing the present involves preventing the objectification of the present, and thus its accompanying reality, time, and that which is found in reality. Objectification leads to utilisation, and this involves taking that which is objectified as an object and thus as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. The notion of what it means to exist in time can be said to have been undermined by the lack of appreciation for meaning by the self-understanding derived from disengaged reason.²⁰

Objectifying the present has led to an empty homogeneous physics which contains events that are related by mere causal relations and conditioning, in turn provoking questions on how we relate life to this unmeaningful time with its disengaged, particular subject.²¹ For both Husserl and Heidegger, pre-reflectively, our experience is not itself an object for ourself, because when we live we do not have the perspective of an observer as if it were a spectator that is attentive of experience via a third-person perspective, rather if we have an experience we are conscious of it, but this does not mean that we take it as an object in which we observe or reflect on.²² The issue this project maintains with science is its aim to isolate the conditions required for the emergence of consciousness to arise, as science aims to abstract from the curiosities of particular experience and thus hopes to discover the commonalities among the greatest number of experiences possible.²³

This project thus promotes the Romantic notion of re-engagement with nature,²⁴ and promotes the notion of a subject or self with expressive power through its depth (a notion from the late 18th century when the Modern subject is not limited to the power of disengaged rational control, but also has expressive self-articulation through the creative imagination).²⁵ It strays, however, from any sort of Romantic materialism. One could state that this project therefore dovetails on Romanticism’s quest to conquer the Enlightenment, a battle still being carried out today, as this project (by aiming for a conception of the present as a non-object) is alike Romanticism, in that it also aims to counter the Enlightenment ideal of instrumental and disengaged reason; a reason which promotes hedonism and atomism, but which more importantly fragments human life (divides the human being into departments and drives the human being from nature and one another) and undermines meaning.²⁶

The present is treated increasingly as a mere object from the scientific third-person perspective view from nowhere, and this is derived from the perspective found in the Modern world. The scientist does not approach the world as a whole, so expanding life as a research scientist and becoming a philosopher could allow science to address the ‘epistemological problem’ of internal experience.²⁷ Heidegger aimed to overcome subjectivism by understanding its true nature via a clearing that can de-objectify the present through aesthetic experience, which does not have to be in support of subjectivism.²⁸ This relates to identity as the Modern identity arose through changes in self-understanding linked with Locke’s possessive individualism and practices that were internalised,²⁹ and a Modern individualism built on three facets, that of self-responsible independence (localisation), recognised particularity (atomism), and individualism of personal commitment (productive power).³⁰

Temporality for Heidegger shows itself in anticipatory resoluteness, disclosedness’ authentic mode, and most people are not ‘tapped into’ this mode, because it is a mode that normally loses itself through an inauthentic entanglement in what everybody else thinks or for Heidegger the ‘they’s’ self-interpretation.³¹ The loss of authenticity leads to comprehending the world as a mechanism and thus as having the potential for instrumental control, in turn designating the human race as the possessors and masters of nature.³² Such an instrumental stance historically speaking was eventually given spiritual allure, as it now allows us to experiment, provides us with rational control of world and self, preserves any God’s order and ourselves, and finally, protects us from our absorption into things; a merging which is a mistake for the Modern view, because nothing should be treated as an end valuable in itself.³³ This project does not aim to show the benefits of absorbing ourselves in objects, but the value of non-objectifying that found in reality, with the objectification of the present as the first ‘mistake’, and thus the first notion to be de-objectified in order for everything found in the present to follow suit. Involving an objectified present in our experience is to involve a mechanistic world, and so this project aims to free our experience from such a mechanism.

This non-instrumental view is similar to Romantic views, as Taylor informs that for Hulme and Heidegger alike: "In a mechanistic, utilitarian world we come to deal with things in a mechanical, conventionalised way. Our attention is turned away from things to what we are getting done through them. One can see immediately the close parallel with Heidegger. Our ordinary interests focus us on objects as ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden); we forget altogether the way in which objects are primarily there for us as ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden). There is a steady tendency towards the forgetfulness of Being which has to be reversed by an existential analytic, a study bringing to light the forgotten being of things and opens us to the meaning of Being, which has been obscured and covered over in our Modern worldview."³⁴

The meaningless of Being is an idea that hinges on an objectified present, as a present that is found as an object is one that will allow its contents as well to be objectified for instrumentalisation rather than intrinsic value. This project, rather, will aim to build upon the Husserlian notion that the self involves a life that retains its vital modes, which we will refer to as hypostases, and that the self continually varies along its life in a meaningful manner.³⁵ Such value will be shown to stray from the meaninglessness of living in an objectified present, which is a present that is promoted by the Modern identity.

One manner we can stray from the Modern identity is to take the self as hypostasis. Taking the self as hypostasis involves conceiving the self as a representation that is found in present reality.³⁶ This representation supervenes on its essence rather than being a mere effect or epiphenomenon of it. In this book, we do not delve into the issues of anhypostasis or enhypostasis, as we are not aiming to describe Jesus’ humanity or human nature, but the human self’s nature through thoughts on the present. Levinas links the present and hypostasis by stating that the present is at the same time an event, but not yet anything existing, yet at the same time a pure event expressed through a verb.³⁷ Unravelling the relation between the present and identity will be shown throughout this book as a fruitful and imperative activity for authenticity.

Taylor characterises what can be stated as the self as stasis rather than hypostasis, as a disengaged entity. He states: The subject of disengagement and rational control has become a familiar Modern figure. One might almost say it has become one way of construing ourselves, which we find it hard to shake off. It is one aspect of our inescapable contemporary sense of inwardness. As it develops to its full form through Locke and the Enlightenment thinkers he influenced, it becomes […] the ‘punctual’ self.³⁸ So how are we to escape or in the words of Taylor, ‘shake off’ the punctual self and the objective present it requires?

Well, despite the presence of the Modern self today, there is still a search that involves being ‘there’ to the greatest extent, thus being more attentive in experience as we aim to clarify our feeling about experience; a reflexivity and self-awareness that does not disengage, but rather engages with the intentional dimension.³⁹ Intentionality involves the a priori of correlations for this dimension to flourish.⁴⁰ Intentionality of consciousness in particular involves the self not being understood as a type of fixed and immutable substance within the mind, and neither is the self taken as any class of object existing independently of its representations as if pre-existing before them. Thus, the self is not a pole of pure identity, as the intentionality brought on from phenomenology characterises the self as an experiential dimension because the self is understood as an interpreted representation of itself.⁴¹

Throughout this project, aesthetic experience, creativity, and improvisation will be the motifs that are considered to allow us to be engaged in this intentional way. This project will thus attempt to verify what happens to the present when we do or do not disengage with it, by asking questions like: how are we to de-objectify the present and all that it accompanies and vice-versa? Aesthetic experience will be claimed to connect us with naturalism’s spiritual significance, that is, the thought that thinking beings are part of a physical order that can awaken an awe or wonder in us and eventually move us. Such a view appreciates the emergence of our consciousness, and which more importantly for this project is in contradiction to Cartesian views of consciousness and self (mainly because the dominant ideas in Cartesianism are the immortality of consciousness and superliminal purity of the cogito).⁴²

Aesthetic experience then, in a Paul Kleeian manner, can be situational and full of potential, rather than be considered a whole that is self-contained or final and determined.⁴³ Aesthetics developed in the 18th century, coupled with a new understanding of artistic and natural beauty, focusing more on the quality of experience than on the nature of an object perceived. And so aesthetic as a term directs us to a mode of experience that can appreciate the emergence of consciousness and self.⁴⁴

This project aims to promote aesthetic experience as providing for a sort of engagement with the world rather than a separation, but also it aims to show that since we create our self, we experience it aesthetically. Quite generally, we want to borrow the notion from the expressive theory of art that aesthetic experience can complete and realise the human being and in turn rescue us from the objectified present promoted by the detriment of disengaged reason.⁴⁵ It therefore aims to stray from the aesthetic experience that Panofsky considered: that a surface that is painted loses its materiality, which in the Middle Ages it indeed possessed, as the surface of the painting is no longer opaque for Panofsky, but a window, and through it we see reality from the perspective as it appears; a ‘freeing’ of the object as an aesthetic experience that also frees the subject via a higher self-consciousness and distance from the object to allow for a standing over that which is depicted instead of being englobed by it.⁴⁶

The aesthetic experience we vouch for is one that englobes and engages us back into the world or painting in this sense, instead of disengaging us in this Panofskian form. What this can entail is to re-experience the world, as the natural attitude from Modernity which we find ourselves relating to disengages us in order to de-experience the world. Disengaged naturalism from Modernity only recognises scientific explanation’s order.⁴⁷ The scientific mind is set towards its reality in a manner that is distant from the past and thus towards a present that carries in it only the test of actual findings, which treats the present as an object, as there is never anything that can counter new pasts that arise with emergent events.⁴⁸ Taylor informs that for Panofsky, the Modern distance objectifies the object, thus the world and the presenting order to personalise the subject (human being), allowing the subject to free itself at the expense of objectifying the present.⁴⁹ The natural attitude is part of this distantiality, and it is juxtaposed to the personalistic attitude, as the former relates to nature and causality, while the latter to spirit and culture.⁵⁰ The latter involves values and meaning, so it is an attitude dealing with the practicalities with the world as persons, not just with objects as objects.⁵¹

Modernity’s Enlightenment naturalism and its disengaged instrumental reason, can be said to lead to a superficial society without passion, dividing our consciousness between reason and sense, and dividing us from each other.⁵² And so this view is thus one-dimensional as it does not involve any significance, depth or meaning, as human life is a matter of fulfilling desire; however, what is worse, the basis for having goals, desires, or motivations, which are intrinsically rather than instrumentally worth fulfilling, are missing, as the instrumental stance objectifies our present and nature in order to view them as a neutral order of things via the boundaries and divisions (between human beings and the present/nature, within humans, and between different humans) such disengagement executes.⁵³ For Husserl, the Naturalist Attitude, as the scientific one, aims to eliminate any significance in the world that may exist for the personalistic attitude associated with the life-world and its motivations, desires and goals.⁵⁴ The Naturalist Attitude is one that objectifies the present, and can clearly characterise the Modern mindset of contemporary times.

Husserl aimed to define the mode of being in human life which plays in the present, but a present that is headed towards the future, maintaining it in the present as what is going to come whilst maintaining in the present what has just happened, which means the present is pregnant with the future and past. The retención/retention and protención, means the present retains (withholds) the past and has a protención (stretching forth) for the future, making the present a lived present (lebendige Gegenwart) instead of an objectified one.⁵⁵ San Martín states: I live the present, but my present dilates or expands towards the past and future. This is the fundamental structure of the conscious life of the self […] This indissolvable unity of the three temporal moments is the nucleus of the human life structure.⁵⁶

The sciences involve an objectified present which is treated without retención or protención.⁵⁷ Escaping from the Modern viewpoint thus provides for an important leap into a dimension that allows us to value the present as a non-object. Husserl’s notion of a lived time that was to be understood phenomenologically through a disconnection from the uniform cosmic time (which we will see is a clock-time, inauthentic now, and Laplacean) in order to reach a pure present and pure experience of lived time or the basic structure of the self’s time, is the consciousness of internal time.⁵⁸

The notion of cosmic time deriving from a stance to nature inspired either through Romanticism or materialism, where nature is the locus or source of meaning, and so feeling and thought emerged from nature bringing forth a sense of depth.⁵⁹ The classical and meaningful cosmos was eternal and unchanging, whereas the biblical universe was historical, and so being in the universe meant being within an ordered whole; however, in the 18th Century, we have a geological time that involved not only an immense time scale through which the universe evolved, but also cataclysmic changes.⁶⁰

This new stance to nature brought on a change in the human imagination and our place in nature.⁶¹ This project argues that this was what commenced our objectification of the present and self, which we will see more on below. Despite emergence’s contribution to this new stance to nature and conception of time as linear, this project will propound a sense of emergence that is not necessarily meant to be understood in such a materialistic and linear fashion. Phenomenology allows us to support emergence without the reductive materialism of the naturalism of Modernity.

What such an understanding provides for is thus a protection of immaterial consciousness, and in turn, the human being, as through a value of the present as a non-object, but as something that is non-static, we do not find ourselves in a world to be possessed objectively, but rather, a world to be lived through without the covering of superficial masks.

The mask we as humans can tend to use and wear to engage with the world can lead to confabulation and can be characterised as ensconced from the real world and the inevitability of death. With our immersion into the everyday world on the other hand, we are involved in both facticity and transcendence, taken as the ekstatic past and future. The former considers that we are thrown into the world already with a past, whereas the future involves a standing out or ‘eksistence’ because we live in the not-yet-now or possible; hence the present is considered our immersion into the inundation of everyday concern, which is why Heidegger for example gives primacy to the future.⁶² Although Heidegger was against the perspective on time with the present as the dimension that is to be dominant,⁶³ this project aims to show that the present which Heidegger was proposing to undermine was the objectified present, which in his terms was the ‘Now’ or awaiting, not the authentic ‘Moment’ of anticipation.⁶⁴

Heidegger states: "The existence of the Moment temporalises itself as fatefully whole, stretching