Sheaves
The transcendental ego of Husserlian phenomenology is a sheaf. That is a rapid and condensed notation and needs more working out from me, but I wanted to get the thought down somewhere before it vanished. So, in terms of ordinary living, what I’m thinking is that knowing someone, including knowing oneself involves the construction of a sheaf. A sheaf is a term from mathematics and this definition by Fernando Zalamea perhaps starts to indicate its applicability to psychotherapy:
To construct a sheaf on some space allows us to ‘shift the discourse’ from something less well-understood to something better-understood by ensuring that the less well-understood object is faithfully patched together from regions of better-understood structures – and this even though the better-understood structures in themselves may initially appear to have nothing to do with the less well-understood object that we want to study.
A sheaf can thus be regarded as an answer to the following question: what kind of rule turns local nonsense into global sense? More suggestively put: A sheaf is a rule to patch together nonsense into sense. And if we are in possession of a sheaf then we can literally replace our object of study with a sheaf defined on it – and proceed to study that sheaf, forgetting all about the object we started with. This simple but vague idea of a sheaf was of monumental significance in 20th century mathematics. (WittgensteinSheaves 3)
And Husserl is the philosopher who is tremendously interested in how it is possible for us to know anyone other than ourselves. He had a desire to think ‘a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else, a transcendental theory of so-called “empathy”’ (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 92). He felt that this is business of experiencing each other is a more complicated thing than one might have wanted it to be. His reflection led him to believe that there is no direct experience of the other and that if there were, ‘if what belongs to the other’s own essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be the same’ (Cartesian Meditations 109). By this logic, direct experience, what would seem to be immediate confirmation that I am not alone, turns out, on reflection, to leave me more alone than ever.
Psychotherapy might weird us out sometimes because it involves leaving the more direct understanding of oneself, loved ones, other people in general. Perhaps the injunction Freud makes the ‘fundamental rule’ for people in analysis, to say ‘whatever comes into their heads, even if they think it unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical . . . or embarrassing or distressing’ (Freud, Standard Edition VII, 251) is a way of encouraging a sheaf to be patched together. The rule is perhaps a response to a wish nobody knows they have, to make sheaves, to begin a new kind of harvest. The sheaf is always made of materials from more than one region, and always remains itself a gathering of differences. Free from the tyranny of what we think we know about situation, we get into something that in Zalamea’s words ‘may initially appear to have nothing to do with the less well-understood object that we want to study.’ But despite that appearance, the sheaf allows us to study ourselves, live, spontaneously but also fruitfully and in a way that works because it loosens the grip of what we already believe we know about ‘me’ and ‘myself.’
Finally, the way to talk about this is also derived from poetry, painting, music, cinema, you name it. Science, technology, whatever you can know. For the joy, here is Fred Moten, whose poem ‘The Red Sheaves’ in the catalogue to a recent exhibition by Jennie C. Jones takes us up into the company of many others from whom we learn about ourselves, who were there all along, and who we can be with:
Because we want to see what it will be like to submit to no design, to be undevoted to our line breaks, to have them only ever come from having been broken, cut, cut off, or having been surprised by the real in the neighborhood, like when we come upon what comes up on us from behind, while we be walking straight ahead, eyes wide open, over the rentpartying cliff of some threshold, having walked right through the bend in Betty Carter’s river, through the scent of the heather, in the shimmering, in the wreck, all up in the water, remember, with all them birds, because, in our shared attention to edges and margins, we are certain in nonfull nonsimplicity, tuning, turning. (Moten. ‘The Red Sheaves’ 28)
You can read, and hear the whole thing by scrolling here. But it’s a thought, that psychotherapy might be a thing we do because of a thirst to ‘see what it will be like to submit to no design.’