Techne + logos

Design, Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Etymologically, technology implies service-dominant logic!

techne- — craft.

-logy — speak, tell.

Technology is the explicit tip of craft. Technology is explicit know-how.

Originally, technology was not the product of explicit know-how, but rather, the system of explicit know-how that enables production.

In that intellectual deformation Heidegger called technik/technicity, the industrial faith of engineering, all relations are frozen into commodifiable things.

And no, Marxists, this is not capitalism. Or not only capitalism; it is you, too. Your own ideology is dominated by technik, which is why wherever you overthrow capitalism you replace it with something even more industrial and soulless.

This problem is deeper than economy, deeper than the question of who owns and controls the means of production, deeper than our methods of production. It cuts all the way down into how we conceive materials, how we approach them, how we relate to them.

Marxists turned the contents of Hegel’s idealism upside-down, without ever inverting his idealist metaphysic. The content was churned inside the unmoving container of mind, which remained, as it always does in such ideologies, “its own place”. It is an idealist metaphysics that thinks its thoughts about matter and thinks all this thinking gives it the object of its thought.

Such “materialism” never receives the blessing of material’s apeironic smile. “Typical man,” she says, “always confusing your ideas about me with me.“

Truth strata

Philosophy

However much the content of our philosophies claims relativity, constructionism, or ephemerality, the act of making such claims indicates universal absolutes. It appears to be a performative contradiction.

Is this a restatement of the same argument we’ve all heard — that relativism self-refutes, by making a non-relative assertion? Yes and no. The content is the same. But here, we are doing something different.

We are not refuting or negating the relativist claim, but rather indicating a transcendent tendency of thought — a self-transcendence that leaves strata of thought-modes in its wake.

The claim of relativity establishes a new mode — one that is not itself relative.

And the recognition of this modal establishment constitutes yet another mode.

Some truths are relative, constructed, and ephemeral. Others are less so.

And some truth is absolute, universal, and eternal. The evidence of this final kind of truth is most conspicuous when we attempt to deny its realness.

Representational eclipse

Metaphysics, Star

Heraclitus:

One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.

The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.

Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream.

When we are “absent-minded”, interacting directly, intuitively with the world, without mediation of words, we are three-fold present: in time, in place, in self.

This is true even though wordless action, performed without inward “written instructions” leaves no linguistic “paper trail” in our memory. “Words, or it didn’t happen.”

Psychologists and other wordworlders call this wordless immediacy “the unconscious”, the misnomer of misnomers. Words know only words.

There is nothing wrong with a sheer veil of dream, but when dreams grow opaque and eclipse life beyond dream, we will know truths, but we are oblivious to anything beyond truth. Then when we say “it is objectively true” and we say “it is real” we mean the same thing.

Hemlock candidates

Biography, Fables, myths & parables

One thinker believed he finally discovered the absolute truth, and became a total asshole.

A second thinker arrived at one of many possible conceptions of truth — but it was a conception of such vast scope, clarity, usefulness and inspiration that anyone who understood it was in danger of mistaking it for the absolute truth — and  that thinker became an even worse asshole.

Subject of study

Philosophy

When I read esoteric texts — texts where the content is not immediately understandable, for instance philosophy, sociology, theology, hermeticism — and work hard to understand the content I am reading, the primary goal of the effort is not to understand the content. That is a secondary goal.

The primary goal is to experiment with new subjectivities. With esoteric content I must make changes to my own subjectivity in order to comprehend what is being conveyed. To understand means to change myself into a subject capable of comprehending the material.

But these changes to myself extend beyond the content, to my overall experience of reality. I find myself noticing different things and finding them significant in new ways. My aesthetic tastes change and see beauty and repugnance in different phenomena.

Each change makes experiential tradeoffs. Some things get sharper, clearer and more important. Other things become fuzzier, cloudier and lose significance. Existence as a whole takes on new tones and flavors. I’ve read things that make reality seem hopeless and not worth the trouble. I’ve read other things that make reality seem deeply tragic, essentially painful but infinitely valuable.

Most of all, the overall effect of all this subjective change has highlighted realities that never change. These alone seem true to me.

And what most people around me regard as “the truth” seems an artifact of some truly unfortunate subjective states they never chose, but to which they are loyal, not out of love but lack of alternatives.

The crafty animal

Philosophy

We understand ourselves better when we conceive of ourselves as beings who craft. Our meta-understanding of understanding — our conception of how understanding happens — becomes more comprehensive and pragmatically sound when we root it in craft.

If you are acquainted with the history of laboratory science, you know that modern science dawned with the material crafting of scientific experiments.

Yes, humans think, we observe, we use language. And we understand important things about ourselves when we understand ourselves as thinkers, observers and speakers. But when we try to put these things at the center of our existence, we lose something essential about our being and our understanding of being, and all resulting notions suffer from disastrous detachment from infinity.

Not so with craft! Craft preserves material as what it truly is — not infinitesimally small particles or all-encompassing expanses or energy or space-time continua or anything the mind a divine physicist can conceive — but rather, the purest and most protean apeiron.

I’m game for the philosopher’s eternal mad libe: The human being is the _____ animal.

The human being is the crafty animal.

Word torture

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.

This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.

I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.

Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.

But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.

Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.

How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:

His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.

My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”

Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.

Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.

“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”

“Shivah? Kaddish?”

“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!

“Moishe, is that you?’

“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”

“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.

“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.

“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.

“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?

I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”

What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.

It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.

Demurely.

This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.

She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.

The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.

Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.

And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.

They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.

He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.

I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.

The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.

Gerundity

Design, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

We can think of metaphysics our understanding of what is really real, behind the world of phenomena.

We can also think of metaphysics as something we do. Metaphysics is an action we perform when we need to integrate a subjective experience into absolute reality as we conceive it. (This is often called “objective” reality, See note below on why I do not.)

For some particular object of some particular experience to be part of reality it must find its place in an ontology rooted in some particular metaphysic. I’ve called this “touching base”. Say, for instance, a person has an emotion or intuition and wants to account for what it is. Is it an epiphenomenon of neurobiology? Is it a message from the spirit world? Is it a manifestation of an archetype? Is it the detection of a moral principle. What do we do to give this wisp of subjectivity the dignity of realness to ourselves and to those who know what we know? What substrate or matrix do we link it up to?

We can pragmatically establish the meaning of a metaphysics by its practical consequence. What kind of ontological grounding operation do you do in order to situate a subjective experience within your best conception of absolute reality? That is the pragmatic meaning of your metaphysic.

In my library life, I’m thinking about process philosophy.

In my office life, I’m thinking about service-dominant logic (SDL).

I can’t find where I wrote this, but I swear this is an older thought: service-dominant logic is an alternative business metaphysic.

Both of these philosophies/frameworks volatilize things into interactive dynamics, and blur the boundaries between noun and verb.

They put relations at the heart of reality.

Every noun is a gerund in disguise.

Light, photon and wave.

Being. The doing of am.

YHWH: was-am-will-be

Note: Some people have a metaphysic that is identical to their ontology. Others have a metaphysic that transcends their ontology. For the former, absolute reality is (or often is) objective reality. For the latter, objective reality and absolute reality are different.

Sacrificial offerings to the ideoidol

Biography, Love, Religion

Many of us cling to ideas that make us feel sane, but which, in actuality produce insanity.

The worst kind of idol is mental. Very few of us worship golden idols, but all but very few of us worship ideoidols.

I know parents who were faced with a choice between their ideoidol and their own child. In the wordless depths of their soul, they are placed as a crossroads:

Do I sacrifice this idea I believe in so fervently for the sake of my child, or do I sacrifice my child to this idea?

All but very few sacrifice the child to the idea.

Goebbels shot his own children before allowing them to live in a denazified world.

I know a child who was unable to accept her parents’ fundamentalist faith. When insistence failed they used shame. When shame failed, they had her exorcised. When exorcism failed, they threw her out of their home.

I know another child whose mother joined a cult that taught a great secret. The secret was so simple it was hidden in plain sight: she lived in a world of her own creation, and the purpose of this world was love. Whenever her child said something disturbing or confusing, this was a lesson that could teach her whatever wisdom she chose to learn. The child became a great teacher, who taught her deep truths that somehow she’d already known all along. After that, he was no longer distressing at all.

Today, many parents refuse to acknowledge own children’s obvious psychological distress and instead believe their own ideology when it soothes them with lies: the despair and confusion the faith itself inflicts is just sensitivity toward a worthless and dying world. The ideoidol masticates and slurps and smiles an oily, bloody smile. “Your child’s deep despair is the only sane response to an unjust and doomed world.” As the child dissolves into a formless blob of dark feelings and appetites in gastric juices, the ideoidol strokes the mother’s head, coos and flatters her self-awareness, her selflessness, her deep concern, her willingness to do the work.

Virtuous Bill

Biography

In college I knew a guy named Bill.

Bill saw himself as a values-driven person. Certain virtues mattered a lot to him and he put a lot of effort into living up to his own high standards. He was morally serious, emotionally sensitive, altruistic, literary and pensive. He was anti-racist, anti-sexist, and generally anti-bigot. He was an uncompromising idealist. Everyone knew this about him.

The problem with Bill, though, was that it wasn’t enough for him to live up to his own standards. He wanted to experience his virtues and himself as virtuous; and for that he needed moral foils. People who were morally frivolous, amoral or even vicious made his own morality stand out in relief. It gave his virtues something to do — something to resist or oppose or silently endure and resent. The slight shittiness of slightly shitty people helped Bill experience who he really wanted to be.

Whether he was aware of it or not, he seemed to enlist whoever happened to be around him in his personal moral dramas. In his presence, I could always feel some scene he was acting out, and the role I was cast to perform. And it was rarely a flattering character. I felt pushed and pulled and twisted and pressured into a character only tangentially connected to myself, and I often felt torn between going along with Bill’s game which required some degree of self-betrayal or swimming upstream against the social current Bill was establishing and creating unpleasant and exhausting tension.

I now recognize that Bill was a man from the future.

His ideals perfectly match those of many educated young people today. They match the ideals of many educated old people who prize youth and try to stay youthful by imitating the young. But back then it was much less common, and acceptance was not nearly as automatic as now. Back then it took some vision and courage, and willingness to be scorned by cool people. I believe Bill deserves some credit for being far ahead of trend.

Today, whenever I’m enlisted as a moral foil, which is every day — when I feel myself being someone else’s capitalist, or white guy, or old man, or dirty Zionist, or milquetoast liberal, or suspected closeted conservative, or whatever they’re after — I think about Bill and his virtuousness.

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.