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Failure Is Freedom

Failure Is Freedom

Written by: https://www.martinessig.com
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About this listen

I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.

https://www.martinessig.com/

© 2026 Failure Is Freedom
Music Philosophy Social Sciences Spirituality
Episodes
  • The Abyss of the Otherness Within
    Jan 23 2026

    The Symbolic is not at one with itself, which means that knowing through representation is not only mediated through language but also shifty. However, it is the immediacy of this "shiftiness" that allows for knowing to be a dynamic, experimental flow that reflects the dynamism of being as a process of becoming. Hermeneutics is the sort of shifty knowing that reflects the provisional nature of both knowing and the experience of becoming. The shiftiness within is not disingenuous but the abyss from which all hermeneutical ingenuity emerges, and what allows us to become constantly new by becoming other than ourselves.

    Jean-Luc Marion divides "Saturate Phenomena" into those aspects that can be taken in to ourselves through the intention and those that are intuited. There is a mismatch between intentional, phenomenological representation and immediate, affective intuition. Saturated Phenomena are defined by the too-much-givenness of the intuition that cannot be reduced by the symbolic intention to phenomenal and conceptual objects. The intuition then is a kind of awareness of "over-proximal affects" that can't be symbolize, so that they are in the Lacanian register of the Real, which is the absolute resistance to symbolization. It is this unsymbolizable otherness that connects the abyss within to the abyss without, and which allows being's becoming to be the experimental interpretation of the hermeneutical circle.

    The shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics is the shift from intentional identification in the Symbolic register to the provisional, shifty interpretation in the resister of the Real through the Lacanian Imaginary.

    Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

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    53 mins
  • Otherness in Phenomenology Versus Hermeneutics
    Jan 15 2026

    Formal Phenomenology began with Edmund Husserl's attempt to discover the ground of phenomenal appearances and the relations between these appearances and the "things-in-themselves." His "Eidetic Reduction" hoped to reduce the internal intention of the subject to increase the external intention of what shows itself to the subject, so that what is other than the subject might show itself from its own intention without the interference of the subject's presuppositions, which are a reflection of the subject's intention and not of the Other that appears on the subject's intentional screen. The problem with the Eidetic reduction was that it was the subject's presuppositions that allow the Other to appear at all. What is outside and other to the subject must be brought into the subject, or appear to the subject, via an interpretive frame work, starting with Kant's "A Priori Categories" for basic perception and ending with the concepts given to human subjectivity by their collective Imaginary and Symbolic registers for more advanced "understanding."

    Things-in-themselves aren't things or objects. They must be in relation with an outside or with otherness or with the intention of another because objects are reified by relations of difference according to physical rules, perceptual apparatuses or concepts. The outside co-arrises with the inside as a relation of difference governed by the natural laws, perceptual categories, and by the signifiers of minded things. The internal parts of an object are made whole by the intention of the whole, but the wholeness of an object isn't isolated within its objectification, but rather it is a relational intention or an intention extended into its outside environment. Evolution by natural selection is a principle that relates bodily objectification to "niche" intention, so that the body of an organism reflects its niche in its biome.

    In phenomenology this co-arising of inside and outside as objectification is articulated as the necessity of consciousness to be about something, or to have an object, so that internal subjectivity is given by the difference of external objectivity, or otherness. Unconscious, or reactive, co-variable arising, or causality, is the physically determined intentionality of material objects. Non-physical, conscious intentionality is awareness-of, which in phenomenology is awareness "of" a different or other intention outside of the internal intention. In psychology the "Theory of Mind" is the awareness of the "mindedness," or of the "subjectivity" of the Other.

    However, the psychoanalytic subject does not have an objectifiable intention as other objects do. There will always be a remainder of irreducible ambiguity after an Eidetic reduction is intentionally performed. And this resistance to identity or to intentional conceptualization is what is singular or different or other about the psychoanalytic subject, not only about the outside other but also about the internal other of the subject itself. Psychoanalysis is hermeneutical in natural rather than phenomenological because the irreducible otherness of subjectification requires interpretation rather than phenomenological reduction to objects.

    Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

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    34 mins
  • What is Otherness?
    Jan 12 2026

    The self / other relationship of being's becoming is the center piece of both phenomenology and of hermeneutics and can help explain why there was a general shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics in theory beginning with Heidegger and culminating in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. This shift was not a total rejection of Phenomenology but an acknowledgement that the goal of Husserlian phenomenology of the "Eidetic Reduction" wasn't possible given the inherent perspectivalism of the showing of being and of the knowing of being. Things may show themselves "from" themselves but they can't appear "as" themselves to another without the other's interpretation of their showing. Any possible appearance of being must appear through an interpretive apparatus or some kind, whether that be a biological mechanism like a sensory system, or a symbolic system of differences like a language.

    But mediation doesn't necessarily lessen the immediacy of being. It may be that mediated being is being showing itself to itself as another, but it may simultaneously be true that the interpretation of being is the immediacy of being's becoming through the mediation of perception and conceptualization, a becoming in which some degrees of freedom are actuated by the immediate distantiation of being from itself as an object for itself. This distantiation of being from itself injects indeterminacy into determinate being, which is the space of nonbeing necessary for being to appear to itself and to know itself as itself through otherness. The relation of being to its other, which is nonbeing, is being's becoming as an immediate, dialectical process "for" itself, or "Being-for-itself" rather than "Being-in-itself," as Hegel outlined. In whatever way Being-in-itself is "immediate," it is so immediate that it can't be "for" itself because it is without the relationality of "for-ness" or any other sort of prepositionally given appearance or knowing.

    The relationality of "otherness" is the ground of any possible appearance of being "to" or "for" itself, so phenomenology must included hermeneutical interpretation without the totalizing reduction that Husserl called "Eidetic," which would mean the identification and defining of an eternal, unchanging essence or substance. Any reduction of an appearance to knowing must include the indeterminacy of otherness's irreducible ambiguity and thus precludes any complete determination of an identity. Every possible identification includes the otherness of misidentification.

    Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

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    48 mins
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