Another banality of evil

Politics

Since Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial, Adolf Eichmann has been the paradigmatic example of “banality of evil”: the autistically unemotional functionary who is “just following orders” with no individual evil intent, but with no sense of moral responsibility for the role he plays as a cog in an evil machine.

But this is only one species of banal evil. Another banal evil is at large today, but one that is almost the exact reverse. This one trades unemotional autism for hyper-sentimental borderline disorder. Instead of just following orders, she “just follows her heart” with no sense of obligation to understand what evils this sentimentality tolerates, supports, encourages or generates. She feels no obligation to think at all — only to emotionally react to whatever is thrust before her gaze — with no sense of moral responsibility for supplying emotional fuel to an evil machine.

Inapprehensible

Judaism

I make a strong distinction between apprehension, which touches without grasping, and through its touch-feel knows that something is. Comprehension grasps and through its grip-form knows what is grasped.

Apprehension is existential know-that. Comprehension is intellectual know-what.

But the intellect can make many grip-forms in empty space, and whatever grip-form it makes is what it knows. Without apprehension of what it holds, the hand is numb, and it loses all distinction between that which is and what might be.

And when comprehension cannot close its hand around that which is, it protests that what it feels in its fingertips cannot be. There is no grip-form for this object. Precisely: If we allow our minds to accept the existence of ungraspable realities, we will find a great many beings — the beings who matter most — are not to be grasped as convex objects, but only touched from within. These beings are subjects.

The need for a reality made exclusively of objects, comprehended objectively, is a striving for misapotheosis, and the more successful we are at it, the more we starve for nourishment and love: King Midases of knowledge.

An aggressive poke at materialism

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star, Taoism

It is entirely possible to take science seriously and to respect science as the ultimate approach to generating valid knowledge and technological know-how in its own very important sphere, without succumbing to the temptation to make science (or even the ideal object of scientific inquiry) our metaphysical foundation.

In fact, as Thomas Kuhn beautifully observed and articulated, scientists can function better as scientists if they do not confuse their physics and their metaphysics. Why? Because the most important and consequential scientific work challenges our understanding of the ultimate substances and dynamics underlying reality as we know it. When this understanding collapses and then reconfigures itself in radical and inconceivable ways (as they do during scientific crises and revolutions) those whose entire personal integrity and sanity stand upon these understandings cannot maintain themselves during these disruptions. They cannot avoid clinging to these ideas as if their life depended upon them, because, spiritually, this is literally the case.

The best scientists stand on something else as they work on their basic notions of physical reality, even if that something else is never thematized or analyzed. And frankly, scientific analysis and objective thematization is the wrong form for metaphysical understanding. Such attempts are practical category mistakes of the lowest order, which lead directly to fundamentalism, the objectifying of what must be subjective, the containment of what contains, the eversion of being into thing.

I know very few metaphysical materialists who seem fully aware of the difference between a scientific understanding of matter and the givenness of matter and its source. That source is dark and even darker, where darkness is imperceptible — the glaring mercurial chrome behind sight itself.

What metaphysical materialists worship as ultimate is the scientific understandability, not material mystery, not the materially-inflected transcendence known as apeiron. They cannot know it, but they are, in fact, metaphysical idealists.

Today’s scientistic fanatics could be viewed by material mystics as alchemical fundamentalists.

Cryptic Hymns to the Distributed God

Chord, Esoterism, Judaism, Religion

J. L. Borges:

In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Francis Cook:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number.

There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

A. N. Whitehead:

“Concrescence” is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the “many” to its subordination in the constitution of the novel “one.” An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the “real internal constitution” of the actual occasion in question. The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity; in Locke’s phrase, it is the “real internal constitution” of the actual entity.

This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibniz’s in that his monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of “feeling” the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an “actual occasion”; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.

Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. The objectifications of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occasion originates. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction.” Here “feeling” is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity. They replace the “neutral stuff” of certain realistic philosophers. An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a “stuff.”

This word “feeling” is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates elements of the universe, which in themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs these elements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesizing them in the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are “vectors”; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings.

The philosophy of organism is a cell-theory of actuality. The cell is exhibited as appropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension. I have adopted the term “prehension” to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things. In Cartesian language, the essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing (i.e., a substance whose whole essence or nature is to prehend).

Martin Buber:

To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.

The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.

The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.

The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

Hence the I of man is also twofold.

For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.

Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.

Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.

Primary words are spoken from the being.

If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.

If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.

The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.

The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.

–

There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-it.

When a man says I he refers to one or other of these. The I to which he refers is present when he says I. Further, when he says Thou or It, the I of one of the two primary words is present.

The existence of I and the speaking of I are one and the same thing.

When a primary word is spoken the speaker enters the word and takes his stand in it.

…

The world of It is set in the context of space and time.

The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these.

Its context is in the Centre, where the extended lines of relations meet — in the eternal Thou.

In the great privilege of pure relation the privileges of the world of It are abolished. By virtue of this privilege there exists the unbroken world of Thou: the isolated moments of relations are bound up in a life of world solidarity. By virtue of this privilege formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It. By virtue of this privilege we are not given up to alienation from the world and the loss of reality by the I — to domination by the ghostly. Turning is the recognition of the Centre and the act of turning again to it. In this act of the being the buried relational power of man rises again, the wave that carries all the spheres of relation swells in living streams to give new life to our world.

Perhaps not to our world alone. For this double movement, of estrangement from the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is sustained in the process of becoming, and of turning towards the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is released in being, may be perceived as the metacosmical primal form that dwells in the world as a whole in its relation to that which is not the world — form whose twofold nature is represented among men by the twofold nature of their attitudes, their primary words, and their aspects of the world. Both parts of this movement develop, fraught with destiny, in time, and are compassed by grace in the timeless creation that is, incomprehensibly, at once emancipation and preservation, release and binding. Our knowledge of twofold nature is silent before the paradox of the primal mystery.

Zohar:

When the King conceived ordaining

he engraved engravings in the luster on high.

A blinding spark flashed within the concealed of the concealed

from the mystery of the Infinite,

a cluster of vapor in formlessness, set in a ring,

not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all.

When a band spanned, it yielded radiant colors.

Deep within the spark gushed a flow, imbuing colors below,

concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.

The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.

It was not known at all

until, under the impact of breaking through,

one high and hidden point shone.

Beyond that point, nothing is known.

So it is called Beginning.

“The enlightened will shine like the zohar of the sky,

and those who make the masses righteous

will shine like the stars forever and ever.”

Zohar, concealed of the concealed, struck its aura.

The aura touched and did not touch this point.

Then Beginning emanated, building itself a glorious palace.

There it sowed the seed of holiness

to give birth for the benefit of the universe.

Zohar, sowing a seed of glory

like a seed of fine purple silk.

The silkworm wraps itself within, weaving itself a palace.

This palace is its praise, a benefit to all.

With Beginning, the unknown concealed one created the palace,

a palace called God.

The secret is: “With Beginning, ___________ created God.”

Design versus business-as-usual

Design

The difference between a design process and a business-as-usual process is this: with design the extensive planning, documentation and justification comes after the hands-on work, not before it.

In business-as-usual, the entire process must be planned out, documented and justified before work commences.

As Tim Brown put it: “We think with our hands.” And our hearts. And, yes, also our heads. This convergence alone produces practical common sense.

 

Habermas’s simple move

Philosophy

I love Habermas’s simple move: to separately and comparatively analyze the propositional and performative dimensions of communication, in order to illuminate the universal norms implicit in all communicative acts.

When what is done in a speech act (an implied performative truth) contradicts what is said in its content (an explicit propositional truth), we encounter what’s known as a performative contradiction.

A famous example: “This sentence is a lie.” The act of asserting implies truthfulness, but the content denies it—undermining itself through its own performance. A more familiar example: “I don’t care what you think of me.” If that’s true, why say it? The act of saying it appeals to the very judgment it pretends to reject.

Performative contradictions throw tacit performative truths into sharp relief—truths that otherwise slip by unnoticed. They function like ethnomethodological breaching experiments: by violating invisible norms, they make them visible. Communicative acts, it turns out, are ethnomethods—and if Habermas is right, they are universal ones. “Anthropomethods”, maybe?

Habermas’s mature project was to uncover and clarify the norms presupposed by all communicative practice—not what we say about norms, but what our saying always already performs. In doing so, he sought universal norms of communicative rationality—structures that transcend the relativity of our claims by grounding them in the conditions that make understanding itself possible.

Vulgar appropriation of philosophical language drives me nuts. People love the mouthfeel of philosophical terms, but they cannot tolerate the practical consequences of actual understanding. So they make words forged expressly to say something new and elusive and different and level them down to say something old and obvious and same. (And don’t even get me started on appropriation of design language, which is, essentially the leveling down of practical phenomenological language to please the ontic palate.)

“Performative” is a particularly egregious example — one that reverses its intended meaning. In vulgar usage, it’s taken to mean theatrical, inauthentic: the speaker is just being an actor before an audience.

But in Habermas’s framework, and in the philosophical tradition in which Habermas works, performativity is not about deception, it is about action. What is performed in communication is not less real than what is said — it is more real.

Speech actions speak louder than words.

20,000 foot view

Biography, Design

Back in 2018, when I was still getting my service design sea legs, I wrote about the peculiar altitude service design flies at, which I called the 10,000 foot view.

If strategy flies at 30,000 feet (where the ground is so distant it looks like a map) and we agree most design flies at 3 feet (where the ground is so close and so chaotic it is hard to survey), service design flies at 10,000 feet, approximately the cruising altitude of a single-engine prop plane.

10,000 feet is a very useful altitude that bridges 30,000 foot and ground — clarifying relationships between strategy, operations and the experiences real people (real customers, real employees) have as a result — but flying at this altitude does introduce practical challenges.

And I then launched into an extended metaphor, which touched on the challenges of single-prop pilot life, like rough air, flying in and out of clouds and other metaphor-inspiring stuff.

Since that time, service design has elevated itself, and gained altitude.

We now fly at 20,000 feet.

We never get all the way to 30,000 feet where strategic decisions are made, but at least we rarely have to descend below 10,000 feet where craftspeople are stuck making real things.

From this new altitude we can still sometimes catch sight of the ground, at least enough to survey boundaries and understand the zoning. This data is easily understandable and useful to the folks above, cruising at 30,000 feet. If we descend to 10,000 feet we can link up these zones to the general activity taking place there, which is adequate for strategic purposes.

Unfortunately, anyone who depends on getting their feet on the rough ground and their hands dirty with concrete reality as lived by real people in real social settings before they feel like they really understands their design problem — that kind of person might find that things have become uncomfortably rarified, abstracted, overprocessed and unreal.

But those people who like rigor, quantification, standardization, expertise and so on — the kinds of things important people respect — will find this new elevation quite to their liking.

Grampy musings

Biography, Philosophy

It is a supreme privilege and joy to help initiate a baby into human society.

It is intrinsically good on every level — spiritually and emotionally, of course, and even somehow physically — but it is also intellectually fascinating. “Early childhood development” stops being a remote body of knowledge, and becomes experience-near insights, rooted in prolonged firsthand experience. A passage like this makes immediate sense, because the experiences to which it refers are so fresh:

Pointing is not a solitary act by which one actor or thinker confronts the world, identifying objects by means of this act. Rather, the act of pointing implies not only that there is something else to be pointed to, but also that there is someone else to perceive the pointing. Pointing is a fundamental social process. Pointing only makes sense within a social relationship: if a subject is pointing at something to another subject.

Although Kamlah and Lorenzen mention this fundamental sociality of pointing, the impact of this insight is accounted for in sociology, in the sociology of knowledge and in science studies rather than in philosophy. The communicative act of pointing makes it clear, in fact, to what extent knowledge and thinking are social: pointing is founded on a relationship between at least two subjects, who refer to a third element in a way that makes sense to them. If we consider pointing to be a basic act, we must also consider its basic sociality. It is the most general thesis of this book that communicative actions, such as pointing, are the fundamental social process by which society and its reality is constructed.

But now I am thinking about the full range of nonverbal communication that occurs between a baby and adults. Deictic communication (pointing, referring), including indicating actions to imitate, are part of it. But equally important is expression of physical and emotional states — most importantly to indicate needs.

All the talking we eventually learn to do is rooted in a primordial unity of physicality, of feeling, of perceiving, of relating — a world we inhabit a few painful, precious years before language develops to mediate it, tame it — and unfortunately, all too often, to eclipse and replace it.

The key to living in reality (versus our conceptualizations of reality) is maintaining connection with the primordial chaos, and keeping language in this role of mediator, and not as something that dominates or eclipses our participation in this strange, very physical, very intuitive participatory relationship we have with what William James famously called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

Craft brings us back to materials, so we can hear the buzzing, blooming chaos to which we and all things belong, long before we slice thing up into subjects and objects and qualities — light and dark, upper and lower, dry and wet, animal and mineral — each labeled with a name and therefores — all stacked up and ready to be inventoried, quantified, utilized and managed.

Hyperorder metaphysics

Metaphysics, Philosophy

I remain enamored with Habermas’s framing of system versus lifeworld.

It seems to me that our popular philosophy seeks to project a semi-concealed systems-metaphysic beneath our lifeworld. We want to uncover the secrets of this system in order to understand finally how this semi-chaotic lifeworld emerges.

The philosophers I gravitate toward do the opposite. They like me, see the lifeworld as primary, and that systems are what we humans abstract and formalize from this semi-chaos in order to locally and temporarily order it for ourselves. There is no secret system behind the mess, but a hyper-ordered reality that affords many potential but always-partial orderings.

According to this broad school of thought, science is an organized, intricate, precise collaborative lifeworld activity that generates systems meant to explain the lifeworld as comprehensively as possible, and which appears to transcend the lifeworld, while never actually transcending, except in the metaphysical imagination of the scientistic faith.

By the way, I view chaos as hyperorder, not disorder. Hyperorder is what happens when diverse possibilities of ordering coincide so densely and incommensurably that we are unable to pick out an ordering to make sense of whatever concerns us.

My metaphysic is a metaphysic of chaotic hyperorder. Reality is inexhaustibly surprising. However much order we find in it, that order is the furthest thing from ultimate truth.

A prettier way of saying what I’m trying to convey would be to reverse Camille Flammarion’s famous woodcut “L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire” so that he when crawls up to the edge of a uni-ordered universe and pokes his head through its outer edge he beholds myriad overlapping uni-ordered universes in psychedelic communion.

Or maybe the protagonist keeps on crawling, and thrusting his head through successive spheres of reality, once, twice, myriad times — until reality finally thrusts itself through his head, and he finally realizes that all these experiences of transcendence were just varieties of immanence — an ontological kaleidoscope.

Disgusted

Politics

Over the last decade, I’ve heard more and more milquetoast leftish revolutionaries semi-reluctantly accept censorship and even terrorism as maybe legitimate tactics, at least for people who share their ideological tendencies and goals.

Last year, the target of maybe acceptable terrorism was an insurance CEO. This year’s maybe acceptable terrorism target is a zionist couple. When I read the news, I told a friend:

We have a growing domestic terrorism problem, though not the one most professional-managerial types want to pay attention to. I’m really not looking forward to hearing the same kinds of vapid mealtime pseudo-soul searching I heard after Brian Thompson was shot dead on the street. “Well, you know there’s a lot of anger about this genocide. Maybe it would be a good thing if more Zionists felt some fear about who they’re supporting. I don’t know — is fear of violent retribution always a bad thing?…” blah blah blah.

One thing I’ve learned since October 7th: Decency is far scarcer than I ever imagined.

Sure enough, my daughter posted on the DC murders and received this message on Instagram:

I keep having the same thought.

I do not want to prohibit any speech. But if I were going to prohibit any speech it would be speech advocating prohibition of free speech.

I am against all terrorism. But if I were going to terrorize anyone with the fear of being gunned down on the street it would be people who express their support for terrorists who gun people down on the street for holding an opinion they disagree with.

Almost a quarter century ago, I learned a famous quip from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, commonly misquoted as “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” Here is the verbatim:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

A little practical wisdom.

The Greeks had a word for that. Phronesis.

Collective madness

Philosophy, Politics

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Why? Individuals constantly check their perceptions, ideals, norms, opinions, beliefs and plans both with their fellows individuals and with the concrete data of life. This prevents their ideas from becoming fully self-referential, self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling and alienated from life outside the mind.

But with groups, these very checks against individual madness generate collective madness. Group-think and group-feel permeate the beliefs and attitudes of all its individual members. When the individual tries to reconcile their own individual perceptions, conceptions, intuitions and pangs of conscience with those of their peers, they find that they are alone and out of step. Since few people put much work into testing their own beliefs or trying to get their beliefs to integrate in any coherent way, so most people just assume their trusted sources are trustworthy and that their integration with the people around them will produce personal integrity. Instead of challenging the norms around them, they assimilate. They just go with what their peers think, feel, say and do, and assume all critique of these things from groups or individuals are invalid for some known or unknown reason. And when most of what we know about the world comes from content generated by our own group, it is easy to inhabit a largely imagined world instead of a partially imagined one that must answer to controversy and the chaos of reality.

All it takes is readiness to believe in the exceptional virtuousness of one’s own group and the exceptional viciousness of those who oppose you, and a dash of ordinary human incuriosity, and collective madness is inevitable within two generations.

This is one of those times where anyone who is not actively working to keep their minds in contact with mind-transcendent reality is almost certainly floating off in one or another bubble of collective solipsism.

Machloket l’shem shemayim

Judaism, Philosophy

I’m talking with a friend about machloket l’shem shemayim, perhaps the one most crucial value that makes me feel Jewish and which makes a person feel Jewish to me, regardless of whether that person is secular or observant:

There is a practice of truth-finding among us, based on the infinitude of God, where we seek transcendence together, in our own finite being, through disagreement and reconciliation. That practice is Talmudic, but we practice it in marriage, friendship, work, everywhere we can.

No mind is expansive enough to contain God’s truth, but we can approach God by disagreeing well, in the right faith, in ways that allow us to expand our truths together, toward God.

This is what Habermas strives to work out in his theory of communicative action. This is holy stuff!

From an email

Biography, Philosophy

“Hell is other people. But hell is also loneliness. Artificial intelligence gives us the Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich reality we really crave. Endless novelty, but safely unsurprising, the entertainment sweet-spot. Propaganda from our own secret selves — selves so secret that they aren’t even ours. Narcissus’s reflected view was eclipsed by his own head, but now, with postpostmodern digital refraction, we can overcome ego and annihilate bias and see through the backs of our own heads like gods.”

Update:

“My interest is dissolution and recrystallization of selfhood and along with change of what is obvious to us. In other words, I’m interested in conversion events.

Human-centered design demands that its practitioners undergo conversion events, usually minor ones, but not always. We designers must transform ourselves from people who cannot understand how others think, feel and behave to people for whom these thoughts feeling and behaviors make perfect, obvious sense. This can be a terrifying, painful process.

An ideology is a fortified circularity, dedicated above all to prevention of conversion — to exposure to what might trigger a conversion. Ideologies condone, even encourage, suppression and silencing and intimidation and ostracism of whatever triggers dread of conversion.

By now most people have become ideologues of one kind or another. Ideologues cannot change, so they cannot design. Ask a random designer what they care most about. You’ll always get variations on the same answer. Today’s designers do research with extreme thoroughness and rigor, but this research is always a knowing-about exercise that leaves their ideology intact. The findings are extraordinarily detailed and boring. When is the last time you felt inspired by design research findings? The research makes sense, but it is epiphany-free. It was conducted in a way that precludes epiphanies and conversions.

When the design industry dedicated itself to serving the one true and just ideology, it lost what matters most. This is my hostility to progressivism. It wants to be God, but it’s just another shitty little mass-autism — a solipsistic egregore. It killed design.”

The tragedy of Thomas Bachmann, chemist-chef

Fables, myths & parables

Thomas Bachmann’s unmatched brilliance in both chemistry and the culinary arts could have earned him lasting fame in either field. The fusion of these prodigious talents in his pioneering work on taste chemistry secured his place in the annals of science. But what made Tom Bachmann a household name — what, at his apogee, made his miraculous creations the sole subject of conversation at every table and in every forum—was his penultimate triumph, his most original creative leap. It was this very leap that propelled him to his tragic apotheosis — and his fall.

Let’s begin our story where it becomes interesting to non-technical readers, the point where Bachmann first became known to the general public. Over several decades of taste chemistry work, Bachmann’s understanding of taste had grown so thorough, so refined, so deeply internalized, that he discovered he could “sight-read” chemical analyses and imaginatively taste whatever the data depicted. Videos began to circulate of him reading dry tables of chemical formulas and translating them into lyrically vivid descriptions of sumptuous dishes. But it was no freak-show curiosity. His poetic expression stirred imaginations, moved hearts, and whetted appetites in a way the world had never experienced.

For Tom himself, this ability was a source of new satisfaction — and, if he wasn’t careful, pain. Academic papers took on an overwhelmingly aesthetic dimension. He found he could no longer read literature outside his own field, because the tastes conjured by most chemistry papers were unbearable to his imagination’s sensitive palate, often making him gag or vomit. He found he had to avert his eyes from the periodic table. But within his own discipline, he discovered new delight in analyses of delicious foods. Reading a well-executed analysis of a meal from one of the world’s finest restaurants, he could experience it himself with undiminished pleasure.

Here began Bachmann’s journey beyond science into an art entirely his own. He began having spontaneous insights for improving dishes he read about — and he could experience these improvements simply by editing the reports and rereading them. Just as Beethoven could read scores and hear them in his mind’s ear years after going deaf, chef-chemist Thomas Bachmann could compose new tastes on paper and savor them on his mind’s tongue, even before preparing the physical dishes — which, when finally prepared, matched precisely what he had imagined.

Improvement became innovation. Innovation became genius. And soon, his genius birthed entirely new genres of cooking — cuisines so original, so otherworldly, that they made difference among traditional cultural cuisines seem insignificant. Critics and connoisseurs from Paris to Tokyo to Limbourg hailed his creations as daring, sublime, flawless. Entirely new universes of taste poured forth from Bachman’s boundless imagination. The world was gripped. No other art form mattered anymore. He was bigger than Jesus Christ times the Beatles times a million.

But then Thomas Bachmann began to conceive tastes that were physically impossible to produce — and he ceased trying. His greatest work existed only on paper, accessible only to the rare disciples who had followed his path and developed the ability to taste-read. For everyone else, his finest work was beyond reach.

Bachmann himself, his tongue ruined by the ecstasies of ideal tastes, lost all appetite for real food. To avoid the depressing anticlimax of eating, he began receiving nutrition intravenously. His inventions became not only impossible, but increasingly dangerous — each more delicious, and more deadly, than the last. He was tormented, day and night, by vivid fantasies of toxic chemical combinations: flavors of unimaginable, world-transforming beauty that could be experienced only once, fleetingly, a micro-instant before death.

At last, he was found dead at his laboratory kitchen table, a look of rapture flash-frozen on his face. He had tasted his own highest art, his swan song. Several of his disciples, upon reading his final composition and declaring it his magnum opus, also succumbed to the same fate. It was decided that all surviving copies of his greatest recipe would be destroyed. His handwritten original was sealed in a canister and locked in a vault, never again to be tasted by mind or tongue.

Bummer

Biography

It is demoralizing to disclose your mind-blowing, world transforming epiphany to someone who receives it merely as an opinion that they agree with, as if this is just another fact out there available to anyone who happens upon it. “Yeah, exactly.” Or for them to say that they had that exact same insight years ago.

In both cases they think they’re affirming the validity of the insight, but that affirmation is undermined by a denial of precisely what matters most about it: its ex nihilo irruption into the world as something profoundly new that changes everything.

It isn’t even a truth, and certainly not an objective truth. If you conceive what is being conveyed, it is a new subjectivity who leaves a comet trail of blinding truths against the void. It is a faith, reflected in a doctrinal sequin.

I’m constantly doing this to people. And I hate it when people do it to me.

Earlier this morning I was reading Heschel’s God in Search of Man. I think this post might be a response to what he said.

The function of descriptive words is to evoke an idea which we already possess in our minds, to evoke preconceived meanings. Indicative words have another function. What they call forth is not so much a memory but a response, ideas unheard of, meanings not fully realized before.

 

 

 

Constrained excellence

Design, Philosophy

I’ve noticed that many younger designers strive for a kind of excellence in design that causes a lot of strain and imbalance. Idealism and scrupulousness leads them to believe that their job as a designer is to make the best possible artifact — the most polished, most thorough, most comprehensive, most rigorous, most compelling, most airtight artifact imaginable — and the better that artifact is, the better job they’ve done as a designer. They believe that if they can possibly do anything more to improve it, they should.

But there is another way to define excellence that is more professionally sustainable, which judges excellence by how well a design problem can be solved within the constraints of the project. By this standard, a designer who goes above and beyond and exceeds the constraints of the project by working nights and weekends has actually done a worse job as a designer than one who worked within the constraints and made the smartest tradeoffs to solve the problem as completely as possible within those constraints.

One dramatic example of this standard is prototypes. The best prototypes do no less, but also no more than necessary to serve as a stimulus for learning. A novice will mistake an over-developed, over-produced prototype as better than a crude one that is perfectly adequate for the job of testing.

For years, I’ve hung a picture of a very famous prototype done at Ideo on my wall to remind myself of the prototype exactly-enough-and-no-more ethic.

IDEO 1

As you can see, this image is really crappy. I think someone took a picture of it with an early digital camera. And I suppose we could argue that this crappy digital image is exactly-enough-and-no-more to get the concept of a prototype across. IF you want to argue that, touché.

But my OCD inspired me to actually reproduce this prototype in a lovely shadowbox, which now sits exactly-proudly-enough-and-no-more in the lobby of Harmonic’s studio.

Another example of this ethic, applied to design research, is the great Erika Hall’s brilliant and funny guide to smart research design, Just Enough Research. Erika, if you ever happen to see this, I’m still waiting for the sequel: Just Enough Design.

And for philosophy fans, I should also mention that this line of thought can be seen as belonging to the Aristotelian tradition of ethics — ethics of the mean. According to Aristotle, virtue sits in the balance point between vices of deficit and vices of excess.

Too much of any good thing, however good it might be, becomes bad.

I hope I have not just committed a vice of excessive wordcount. I’ll stop here.