Rerereading Richard J. Bernstein

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I am once again rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.

I’m reading it with a thesis: that the Greek word phronesis roughly corresponds to Hebrew derash and refers to the same domain of truth.

My obsession with alternate domains of truth and modes of knowing originates with this book. I’ve wandered pretty far abroad, along divergent traditional paths, and now I want to bring it all home and see how things look.

And modes of knowing is only one of several enduring influences this book had on me. Almost every book in my sprawling library is three or fewer degrees from its bibliography, most fewer.

I am pretty sure it was my first encounter with Jewish styles of thought. At one point I thought Bernstein had invented an entirely new genre of literature. He seemed to be expressing his own ideas through the medium of other people’s dialogue. After a decade of Jewish life, I now know to call this talmudic. Many thinkers and friends drew me into Judaism, but none more than Bernstein.

He also gave me my first exposure to phenomenology and pragmatism, both of which provided crucial philosophical grounding (ironically!) for a philosophical understanding of design. I think more than three-quarters of my design philosophy is represented by and directly attributable to this one book.

Richard J. Bernstein died in 2022.

For me, his memory is a constant blessing. I would like to believe his living presence in my life is a share in his immortality.

Design, enworldment and holistic orders

Design, Enworldment, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Thinking out loud here…

I have been gnawing endlessly on a question of holism.

My thesis is that when people say the word “holism” they generally assume only one of two kinds of holism, reducing the other to the one they know.

I have given these holisms various names over the years.

  • Systemic wholes, belonging to a constructive order that constitutes wholes from assembled parts, bottom-up.
  • Gestalt wholes, belonging to a conceptive order that comprises parts articulated from wholes, top-down.

I believe that these two orders naturally diverge, like notes in scales of different keys, becoming less and less in tune with one another as they ramify, either upwards in ever-expanding systems or downwards in ever-finer articulations.

Further, I believe design is the discipline responsible for getting the two holisms to converge in a local, temporary and tentative unity. I call this unity of dual holisms “enworldment” and I conceptualize the effort of convergence as a “hermeneutic sphere”.

Not every system we construct — however perfectly integrated its functioning, and however much it generates emergent qualities (which makes the system a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts) — will be conceived as a meaningful thing within our sense of everything. A system can be meaningless or even induce nihilism, because it is incompatible with our overall sense of everything. This is fine if the system we are constructing is hidden, or handled only by specialists, but all too often these systems are allowed to damage cultural meaning. No matter how well physics accounts for the behaviors of particles in space, or applies this knowledge to build miraculous digital devices, none of it can make us feel the importance of our lives together.

Not every given thing we perceive as real or conceive as true — however self-evident, meaningful and important it may be to us or to our community — is a suitable part of a system. Some things cannot be integrated and interfere with the functioning of a system. A faith can be overwhelmingly meaningful and even the source of everything we care about, yet what it implies to be true cannot hold up under any systematic scrutiny nor is it helpful in any practical application. This is fine in purely symbolic spheres of life, for instance art or religion, but if they are applied beyond their sphere, they produce inadequately integrated systems. No religious scripture can explain electricity or help an engineer build a battery.

To get both, we must not only tack between parts and wholes in each order to get whole and part to reinforce one another, we must tack between the two orders of wholeness until both orders together form a whole reinforced equally by the wholes and parts of each order. Two hermeneutic circles, in a single hermeneutic sphere.

The question bothering me is whether there really is a “hermeneutic sphere” of two holistic orders, each with its own hermeneutic circle — or whether the plain old flat hermeneutic circle already accounts for both orders. What I call “construction” could just be the bottom-up side of the same hermeneutic circle, whose other side is top-down “conception”.

There is a fine line between playing with a structure (as we might play with a new tool) to see what can be done with it, versus going whole-hog Pygmalion with it. If only the line were only fine, and not also faint, snaky and nebulous.

In my defense, the truth of this framing does not have to be absolute. A physicist inclined to seek constructive wholes still faces the possibility of future scientific crises, challenging the entire conception of the problem that orients the work and shapes the instrumentation of physics as it is currently practiced. And even the most radical neoplatonist must admit that modern chemical engineers can do things with matter beyond the imagination of the most accomplished alchemist, even if those alchemists had superior metaphysical insight.

For all practical purposes, holism is dual, regardless of the ultimate unity, which could very well be beyond all human comprehension of any kind.

Design only cares about practical purposes, which most certainly includes questions of meaning and purpose.

Getting obstreperous over names

Autobiography, Philosophy

Quick note before I forget.

I have toyed with abandoning the word “philosophy” to name my idea craft activities. But an old memory has returned to me and restored my belligerence.

I do philosophy. It’s others who claim the term that I’m not so sure about.

The memory: Back in the 90s, Susan did midwifery activism. One battle she helped fight was resisting the effort of licensed nurse midwives — who practiced modern obstetric nursing in hospitals and birthing centers — to prohibit lay midwives from using the term “midwife”. This infuriated me. Midwives had always, until very recently, all been lay midwives. Why should the lay midwives have the name of their profession stolen from them by technical upstarts? I suggested that if nurse midwives wanted to differentiate themselves from midwives, it was they who should find a new name, and I generously offered the title “obsteress”.

Quasi-infinitudes

Enworldment, Philosophy

Let’s set Rorty spinning in his grave by appropriating, perverting and misapplying his concept of liberal irony to metaphysics.

A good metaphysical citizen exercises metaphysical irony by committing to one of myriad possible quasi-infinite everythings — one enworldment — which participates in the incomprehensible, all-comprehending Infinite One.

Design leadership legitimacy crisis

Design, Politics

TL;DR — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.

Design is, at best, a poorly understood discipline, but more often a systemically misunderstood one.

Design has its own “designerly” ways of thinking, doing and valuing, which represent a completely different and incommensurable social paradigm from that of managerialism. Design knows this; managerialism cannot.

Managerialism, by its very nature, is unable to conceive anything beyond itself. It naively believes its own given truth is absolute. Viewed philosophically, it is locked inside a quite stunted ontology that it believes is reality itself, an epistemology it understands as its sole access to true truth, an ethic it mistakes for morality, and so on. But managerialism famously does not give two shits about philosophy, because it is about action, not speculative dreaming. It cares about what it cares about, and what it cares about is resources it can leverage and utilize to achieve its own quantifiable outcomes.

Design, on the other hand, cares about a plurality of ways of approaching, understanding and shaping the world — what could be called enworldments. This should include managerial worldviews, but it should not include managerialism, the -ism suffix signifying ideological closure that accepts nothing above or even beside itself.

As design is very much and emphatically not managerialist, managerialism does what it does, and reduces design to what managerialism takes it to be. It subjects design to a smug, objectifying, degrading condescension analogous to — and perhaps more than analogous to — that smug, objectifying, degrading and unwarranted condescension to which testosterone-drunk adolescent boys at their worst subject their female counterparts. And similarly — and perhaps identically — when protests are made by these misunderstood, objectified, degraded counterparts, and, inevitably, these protests make little sense to the objectifying, degrading, degraded objectivist minds of businessboys, the protests are jocularly dismissed as nonsense rather than as failures to understand.

Note another -ist. Degraded objectivist minds are an active ingredient of managerialism. To a managerialist, “objective” is a synonym for “absolute.” Reality itself is objective. Subjectivity is only a distorting or blurring or occluding interference to objective access to reality. Managerialism is incapable of apperceiving its own subjective imposition of this objectivism, which is its essential limit. This is a limitation design does not share, but managerialism is oblivious to this truth because managerialism is oblivious to anything it cannot objectively comprehend in its own objective mode of cognition.

Anyone familiar with metacognitive incompetence (popularly known as Dunning-Kruger) will recognize my accusation: I am diagnosing managerialism with ontological metacognitive incompetence. And essential to its metacognitive incompetence is a stubborn refusal to think beyond the strict limitations that are the very source of its malady. It won’t think about how it thinks because this is idle philosophizing and a waste of time. If it did, however, condescend to philosophize, that moment of meta-thinking would destroy its delusions of privileged access to objective reality, starting with the painful insight that objective reality is a naive and manifestly foolish subjective hallucination. Subjectivity objectifies, and reality itself is something that largely escapes objectivity’s comprehending grasp. Designers understand and respond to this reality in ways managerialists cannot.

To say it again, design is a radically pluralist, poly-centered and polycentric social paradigm incommensurable with the managerialist paradigm. Design can and should understand and collaborate with managers, engineers and any other pluralist enworldment. That is what we do. But pluralism is also an -ism — albeit a higher order -ism, a meta-ism — and it must insist on pluralism from its fellows, lest it tolerate aggressive intolerance, and allow its metaphorical “bill of rights” to become a metaphorical “suicide pact”.

Managerialism has all the power in the practical world. It controls business, for sure. But it also controls the state. And worse, it controls most alternative visions of governance. Leftists point at managerialist abuses and call it “capitalism”, while remaining pristinely unaware that their own dreams of seizing technocratic control of society are managerialist through and through. If they manage to get their way their system will generate the same life-sucking nihilism. And indeed, every radical leftist success has repeatedly demonstrably generated horrors and nihilistic despair. Leftist revolutionaries only seek to annihilate one form of managerialism with another, because, being managerialist, managerialism is all they can know. The leftist radical’s self-assessment of radicalism is too shallow to register the sameness of their vision and that of their enemy. They lack anything deeper with which to make a comparison of relative depth. For them, too, reality is objective, which is why they can construe the material mechanisms of history, devise a way to deconstruct the current social order and logically reconstruct a system to replace it. But enough about that — back to business. Back to design.

What concerns me at this moment is a question of legitimacy. How did our design leaders gain their “design leadership” status?

How exactly did they rise to prominence within their organizations and win that coveted seat at the executive table? How do they keep that status? Or better: Who gave them the power and at whose pleasure do they keep it?

Were they raised to leadership by fellow designers who felt that they epitomized designerly virtues, pursued designerly goals and helped their fellow designers excel at their craft? …Who, if dissatisfied, will choose another representative?

Or were they fingered for the position by managerialists who thought what they were saying about design made clear, objective sense, who saw how design might be leveraged to achieve their managerialist aims — and who consequently bought what these design leaders were selling? …Who, if dissatisfied, have absolute firing and hiring authority?

Even a cursory glance makes it crystal clear who answers to whom.

Design leaders often claim their primary role in their organization is to translate design and design’s value into business language, as if these were just two vocabularies for expressing the same ideas and for achieving shared goals.

But they are not. They are incommensurable, clashing paradigms.

Consequently, something must be lost in translation.

What is lost is design itself.

Designers, it is time we interrogate those who claim to represent us.

We must ask them what exactly they think that they are representing when they represent design.

Because it is far from clear that they represent what we do.

Do they represent design to nondesigners on behalf of designers?

Or do they misrepresent design to designers, on behalf of the managerialist order who butters their bread?

Again — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.

I’m not telling designers to take up pitchforks or torches or start assembling Molotov cocktails or anything — but if designers were to stage a mostly peaceful revolt against managerialism, they’d be wise to hold elections among their own kind to decide who leads them to the ramparts, lest the movement be superverted and snuffed by yet more of the same mutiny from above.

This will be compressed and intensified in later iterations.

It is threatening to become a manifesto.

Knocked up

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah, Works

I have been pregnant with a book for a long time, literally decades. The embryo is massive and even more extensive and intensive. It has long outgrown the frame of my soul, and overflowed my universe-sized spirit. At times I have suspected I’m carrying twins, triplets or an unnatural litter, and I’ve even toyed with names — Enworldment, Exnihilism, Second Natural, Everso, Of Pearls and Shells, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah, The Ten-Thousand Everythings.

Today it is dawning on me exactly how weird this book might actually be. Really?: A neoplatonic philosophy of design? But one approached as a design? A designed articulate conception — each articulation named and thus made real — each a component of a constructed system? In other words, per Deleuze, concept design, but less an object than a subject, a human-reality interface. And of course, such a thing must have a suitable auditory, then visual, then material form. Such a thing demands beauty — dense, pervasive, radiant.

A designed philosophy of design …of philosophy of design of…

As of this morning, I believe this book is crowning.

Opening of Enworldment

Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In the constructive order, parts are composed into systemic wholes.

In the conceptive order, wholes comprise articulated parts.

In enworldment, conception and construction unify into one integral whole: a whole which is both an embodied soul and an ensouled body. An articulate gestalt is embodied by a system; a system of parts is ensouled by an articulate gestalt.

Enworldment establishes a vast finite one within the Infinite One. Each vast finite one is a quasi-infinite totality, which from within itself is interior without exterior: one everything comprising all conceivable things, bounded by nothing, for nothingness is essentially inconceivable, imperceptible and therefore incomprehensible — yet intuitible.

Intuition takes givens as given — immediately, spontaneously, usually with given form, but sometimes formlessly. Not all intelligibility comprehends. Intellection, nous, neshamah apprehends incomprehensibility and suprehends in it a call to take part and participate in what comprehends all comprehension.

To insist that either order — constructive or conceptive — is produced by the other precludes enworldment. To enworld, we must assume a present where unification of conception and construction requires conciliation of two orders.

Determining whether the conciliation is a reconciliation or whether the unification is reunification is unnecessary. The two may or may not share an original unity, but they certainly do not yet share a unifying destination, and it is the latter we must pursue.

Pursuit of enworlding unification must, in the beginning, acknowledge two: unformed matter and immaterial spirit. Two which converge to give us material forms and substantiated knowledge, neither of which produces the other.

The mechanisms of gaslighting

Design, Philosophy

If we lack language-equipped concepts, and rely primarily on intuition, we become vulnerable to conceptual bullying.

We experience something, and we have a vivid sense of it, but we lack words to express it. We might even resist speaking of it because words — especially clear explicit words — reduce what we intuit and feel to precisely what is least relevant. Some people — especially people with poetic souls — eschew and resist linguistic reduction to such a degree that they have never developed a capacity for conceptualization and explication, because the tradeoffs to intuitive sensitivity to particularities are felt to be an unacceptable tradeoff. Ham-fisted clarity on generalities interferes with finding the perfect tone, tint or shade to express each minute or grand encounter with mostly mysterious reality.

But intuitions are delicate and ephemeral. They arrive, alight and depart, sometimes leaving only the faintest traces. And if we do not somehow respond with something lasting — a line of verse, a sung or painted impression — they are ours alone, and nobody else’s. They have no social reality. And we human beings are — even the most poetic of us — intimate and social beings.

A friend of mine taught me a Basque saying: “What has a name is real.” The corollary, unfortunately, is “What stays unnamed is unreal.” This, of course, refers to social and intimate existence, transcending the individual person. In the highest orders of truth what stays unnamed is most real, and the poet is most aware of and loyal to this metaphysical truth.

But this fidelity to the ineffable spells alienation from the social and vulnerability to it — by precisely those hard, clear, brutal and language-armed concepts that the poetic soul renounces and must renounce. The inward reality of the poet is absolutely out of step with society, which feels like an absurd, unreal, arbitrary and painful game.

The only hope is interceding intimacy. Someone who can participate in the social order and manage it, and as much as possible protect the poet from its rough handling, but who can also appreciate, intuitively and sometimes indirectly, the poet’s own delicate enworldment, and provide it shelter and a gentle environment. Poets instinctively seek this, if they are unable to enjoy solitude by other means.

But this instinct can be exploited. Someone who poses as a protector might establish an intimate bond, initially gentle, or at least supportive enough, but once dependency develops, as it always does, the protector begins to impose concepts into the relationship that distort, bend, twist or corrupt the poet’s intuitions, and turn intuitions against themselves. The conceptualization of experience resembles but, to some degree, falsifies and betrays the experience, which causes a strange kind of misremembrance. In a sense, the poet is faced with a horrible choice: alienation from fragile intuitive contact with reality, or alienation from what seems to be protection and shelter from social brutality, or return to the less-known brutality of the outside world. This is gaslighting.

The ideal solution is carefully designed concept systems and language, crafted in sensitive response to a poetic sensibility, designed expressly to support poetic existence — to house without imprisonment, to justify without codified impositions, to protect without predatory “protection payments”. This is the open, stable structure of the spiral that never closes, traps and suffocates.

Anyone who has ever suffered gaslighting will bristle at any protector proposition. Sadly, super-personal stability is necessary, unavoidable and, when kept in self-aware balance, good. “Know thyself. Everything in moderation.”

Design, for a time, enjoyed protection and support from design management, design operations and other business-savvy design leadership roles.

Gradually, and then all at once, these disciplines all shifted allegiance, and perhaps even forgot their original purpose. Was it “selling out?” Was it responding to the market? Was it disciplinary anosognosia? Was it systemic misrepresentation of design by leaders with questionable loyalties? (Because it seems increasingly clear that the profession of design is being gaslit by its own leadership.) It is a real perplexity, and therefore probably a combination of these factors and many others.

Designers intuit and feel that they are somehow no longer designing and that they are becoming alienated from their own purpose. But the “thought leaders” of the design profession say that the role, and perhaps the very nature, of design is changing and adapting to new conditions.

These thought leaders are paid to conceptualize and talk. Most of the people they conceptualize for and talk with are not designers.

Design thought leaders spend most of their days participating in managerial life, not collaborating with designers or engaging in design craft. This managerial participation constitutes their primary social existence.

Design leaders characterize this immersive participation as “empathy”, but this empathy can easily become a perverse and suicidal empathy that requires betrayal of design’s own interests, which are in irreconcilable tension with managerialism, if they lose touch with design and stop identifying with the world of design.

The design leaders will, of course, continue categorizing themselves as designers, and will preface what they say with “speaking as a designer…” and then confidently proceed to speak on behalf of design as its representative. But that is not what identity is. By the time someone succumbs to managerialism, real identity is unintelligible.

Real identity is participation in a social milieu, or form of life or enworldment. It is thinking, feeling, acting, perceiving from a specific social standpoint. It is not — despite incessant managerialist identity talk — a categorization, a status, a marketing segment, a type in some typology or a professional label.

When we stop participating in an identity, however much we like categorizing ourselves and claiming to belong to it, our identity stops being what we claim.

The “business empaths” who immerse in and live by managerial ethnomethods, who become fluent in managerial vocabulary, who gain mastery in leveraging managerial techniques, who win status as managerialist design experts and who ultimately adopt managerialist values, appealing to and honoring these values as supreme (despite ritual recitations of idealistic leftist misgivings) — these people gradually, one imperceptible bit after another, lose touch with design and develop managerial blindnesses.

They forget their origins and who they once were (or “outgrow it” as they identify more and more with management). As they forget their native home and language, they are increasingly unable to function as translators, advocates or diplomats of design. They gradually shift to something more like an imperial prefect or colonial administrator, governing at the pleasure of a foreign regime that cares little about what is important to the governed. They mouth increasingly unpersuasive rhetoric about design’s “evolving” role and how this allegedly benefits designers.

Designers feel this evolution as degradation and loss. Something essential to design is slipping away and making the work empty, soulless and corporate, but this loss is difficult to put into words, and impossible to state to the satisfaction of hard-nosed managerials. This is the “reality” design leaders have accepted, and the acceptance is self-flatteringly presented as professional maturity. However, it is the maturity of broken adulthood. It is capitulation to managerialist domination.

I sense a live opportunity to design a philosophy of design that will equip designers with language and concepts to articulate, explain and systematically justify the discipline of design in ways that protect design’s essence and defend it against managerialism, technik and the like, both outside and within the design profession.

Collective anosognosia

Autobiography, History, Philosophy, Politics, Polycentered design

Of the several truly odd things I have come to believe, perhaps the oddest is the scalarity of self. I believe an individual person is only one scale of selfhood. And an individual is far from indivisible; it is, in truth, a society of intuitive centers whose habitual, ritual, complex and frequently disharmonious interactions produce a personality, and whose episodic conflicts and shifting alliances produce moods, some enduring.

I also believe that our relationships with other people (in pairs or small intimate groups) literally produce new transcendent selves, in whom we participate and from whom we receive meaning. Every individual self is suspended in a web of transcendent selves, and all of them influence the inner intuitive order of each person. Let us call this “intersubjective being”, or maybe “intimate being” would be better.

And we also participate in collective personhood. This is encoded in explicit social norms — epistemic, valuative, behavioral, linguistic — and in implicit ethnomethods. These can strongly condition intimacy and individuality. This also has (or so I believe) self, and when we participate in this kind of collective selfhood, this also affects our individual selfhood and the intimate selves to whom we belong.

Martin Buber famously differentiated these two forms of super-individual being. He called the former “interhuman” and the latter “social”.

One pragmatic consequence of scalar being is that anything that can go wrong with an individual mind can go wrong with a collective mind. I picked this up from Nietzsche:

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

And I believe we are living in an age of collective anosognosia.

Constructive-conceptive, another iteration

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy

The constructive order builds up systems of objectively comprehensible givens. The systems may be of material or ideal nature, but the structure is always small defined units combined into larger defined units, which, through their complex interaction, generate emergent behaviors at the larger scale. The understanding proper to these systems — systemic wholes — is construal, examining parts in their interactions, to see what the units are and how they function together to produce emergent behaviors. It is assumed: implicit in the behavior of any whole are implicit processes that, when explicated, account for it entirely, in terms of what units compose it and how those components interact. In the constructive order the smallest unit is primary and the largest is explained by the smaller.

But how are the given objects of the constructive order given?

They are received from a conceptive order that is subtly omnipresent, and therefore absent, in the constructive order. To the constructive order, reality itself is objective, but, in truth, objectivity is a subjective phenomenon.

In the conceptive order, the largest unit is primary and smaller units are significant as articulations within the whole comprising it. But this whole is not an object, but a subject, which is, among other things, an ontology, and a field of objectivity. Part of what prevents the conceptive whole from being comprehended as object is that it is all-inclusive, lacks alterity, and therefore has nothing against which it may be defined as a thing. The conceptive order encompasses literally everything, and each can be called an everything, the articulations of which define every possible thing that particular everything comprises — material, ideal or otherwise. The all-inclusive unit of a conceptive order is the subject, always, ultimately, one.

It is human natural to attempt to objectively comprehend and construe the meaning of anything problematic that raises questions. But conceptive difference cannot be understood in this way. When one everything-sized subject attempts to comprehend and construe another everything-sized subject as such, it finds itself perplexed, for there is no exterior by which a fellow subject may be grasped, only disturbing symptoms of difference in its sense of givenness.

To understand these differences requires very different modes of understanding — modes that include, while exceeding, objectivity. These extra-objective inter-subjective modes of understanding are the very heart of design work.

Designers (when/if they are functioning as designers) navigate subjectivity without committing the category mistake of trying to objectively grasp subjectivity. It seems irrational from the objectivity-constrained understanding typical of managerial social engineering.

These modes effect transfigurations in one’s own subjectivity which, only after the transfiguration is effected, reveal givens beyond those initially given prior to the transfiguration. These transfigurations reveal not only the “what” and “how” of another person’s objectivity but something of the “why” which animates it and invests it with purpose.

And this is what makes the conceptive order so important. It is the very source of importance itself. It is also the source of shared values and felt togetherness.

A transfiguration — or conversion experience — is a partial or complete change in first-person experience on the level of some significant gestalt whole, which spontaneously rearticulates a whole field of experience — of what seems true, why it is important and how one should respond. Transfiguration manifests objectively — as transformation — but the change is plainly prior to fact, method or moral precept. The change happens at an ontological level, top-down, and changes the order of “construction materials” — systematizable things. Such transfiguration often requires considerable deconstruction and reconstruction of systems.

Someone who assumes superior knowledge, who sees no reason to learn deeply and transfiguratively — someone who instinctively, habitually, neurotically or otherwise compulsively condescends from a position of superior insight or technical expertise might be capable of many impressive things, but such a person cannot design.

Such a person — individual or collective — will lose intersubjective consciousness and begin to inhabit and build a purely constructed world.

A purely constructed world is a world given only to one subject, and it is lonely, arid and eventually meaningless.

A world of systems constructed by a single objective logic necessarily induces nihilism.

Interworld alienation

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Allowing some ugly technical language better avoided, here is how it is.

Assiyah is lifeworld, plain and simple. It naturally takes givens as given — Pshat mode of truth — and constructs systems from them. Pshat is one given ontology and objectivity — one naive realism — in which individual being, Nefesh, exists as an object among objects.

Yetzirah is hermeneutic disposition to take some things (perceived or conceived) as given, to be passively oblivious to others and to actively reject or suppress others that threaten the coherence of one’s overall conception of everything. It is the transcendental ordering of any Pshat givenness, and it is normally entirely in the background of everyday life, manifesting only as Ruach — individual (I) and cultural (We) identity and nonidentity (Them). Drash is a mode of truth that attends to this transcendental ordering of Pshat in the background of how we and others understand reality in some particular way — that is, to subject proper, the source of objectivity. Often, this attempt to understand a subject is approached in inadequate Pshat modes of object-comprehension, thus everting it and causing profound and consequential category mistakes.

Ruach-being receives reality as a given all-inclusive everything (a given universe or cosmos), articulated (jointed, partitioned) as every possible thing everything can comprise, material, ideal or otherwise. These articulations are the intelligible forms of that Ruach, including the self-form with which Nefesh identifies itself as a thing among things. Again, an embodied I, an embodied we, an I within we.

For Nefesh-being (animal soul) is the size of a living object who embodies it. Nefesh essentially embodies and constructs systems from givens.

Ruach-being (spirit) is the size of an entire everything as given to one subject. The everything is absolutely particular but relative to Ruach, it is universal, and the very universe itself.

Every subject proper is Ruach, whether personal subject, academic subject, a historical subject (a people). Any I or we to whom reality is given in some particular way and taken-together as some articulate everything of all possible things is Ruach.

Ruach is rarely unidimensional. It contains multitudes of subjects-within-subjects. Any I might understand autobiographically, professionally, politically, mathematically, fictionally, scientifically, legally, psychologically, ethically, ethnically, maybe religiously, etc., but all these various subjects attempt to harmonize into a single, coherent way of taking reality as given as real. This is not always easy, and never perfectly achieved. Self-integration, if attempted, is a lifelong effort. This is true for any individual I, and this is the stuff of biography. But for any We of the scale of community, whose life might span centuries or millennia, self-integration is the stuff of politics and history.

And it is all profoundly complicated by the reality of matter, which cooperates or resists and forces adaptation from unformed matter, from which material givens are substantiated.

Both metaphysical materialism and idealism are right but neither is nearly right enough. Reality is neither top-down immanence nor bottom-up emergence, but both and neither. We are suspended in the between, matter below, meaning above, each alike, the aether inside the square and radiating from the edges of the Chinese coin.

Enworldment is given, embodied reality — given by Ruach and taken by Nefesh, spontaneously recognizing material and ideal forms — taking them and responding to them as given, and from them constructing systems. Systems suggest new forms, forms suggest new systems. And sometimes the systems Nefesh constructs clash with every available articulate form without suggesting any new form. Systemic wholes stand alone without any support from above. And sometimes Ruach imposes its forms upon materials which cannot accommodate them. The forms cannot be actualized in any system. They are out-of-touch ideals with little or no practical value.

In rude moods, I have talked about this coming apart of the conceptive and constructive order as “bullshit and chickenshit” — the impracticable impositions of Ruach upon Nefesh being “bullshit”, and Nefesh’s soulless and dispiriting systematizing being “chickenshit”.

And it is this problem of interworld alienation that drives some of us through the roof of Nothingness itself, into Beriah, the inexhaustible, eternally pregnant source of reborn Ruach.

Two whole-and-part orders

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

Below is another iteration on explaining the conceptive and constructive orders, and the importance of unifying them.

I have noticed that when I talk about “wholes” with service designers, they immediately go into systems thinking mode, according to which wholes emerge from systematized parts. This, to them, is what “holistic” means. Holistic means to look at all given parts together in their interconnectedness and to put them together in relation with one another, so that when they operate in a coordinated way, novel behaviors with novel qualities occur. The behavior of the integrated system is greater than the sum of each behaving part.

To me, however, this is still an atomistic conception of wholeness — one which assumes whatever is larger is constructed from smaller units, and that wholeness emerges as a secondary property of integration of parts within a system.

I believe there is another conception of holism, a more thoroughgoing holism that takes wholes as primary and parts as secondary. This holism sees parts as natural divisions — articulations, in the sense of “joints” — within this whole. What is the nature of this whole, from which all parts are articulations? The whole is the field of experience. The field of experience, of course, includes perceptions, but many other things, and in fact, all other things, besides. Experience includes also conceptions, both explicit and verbal, both intuited and wordless. It includes innumerable barely noticed interactions with materials of myriad kinds and shapes, trials, errors — each teaching our bodies lessons learned wordlessly. Experience also includes recollection of memories, sharp and vague images, and kaleidoscopically shifting stories and morals, all attended by the feelings these recollections evoke. It also includes anticipations of possibilities, some planned, some expected, all clouded by probability, and pervasive apprehension of likely surprise. And it includes what others have conveyed to us in various ways. We experience other people’s accounts of their experiences. And we socially experience trying to live with others who convey things to us that make perfect sense, some sense, no sense or things that seem totally wrong. We trust some people and mistrust others. And sometimes we don’t know where to place ourselves in the continuum of trust and mistrust.

But we must never forget, yet always do: the field of experience is not experienced as experience. It is experienced as objective reality. But, in truth, the objects in this objective reality are defined from this field of experience — objects against a ground of what is experienced as different — for there is absolutely no trace of reality outside this field. The field of experience is articulated, in the sense of jointed, and our verbal articulations follow from this jointedness. Our vocabularies and our language use seek to approximate the given articulation of given reality. And words that fail to approximate the given articulations of our experience of reality as given to us are experienced as meaningless and abstract.

Finally, and of the utmost importance: We experience our experiences as experiences of something beyond experience. And it is this “of” that drives us to objectivity. But objects are only how articulations are given to us. The object form, what defines it against what it is not, is least of all access to reality beyond the field of experience. Nothing is more purely experiential than objectivity.

But how can anyone know this? If we have no reality beyond our own field of experience, why would we believe anything else is there? Why wouldn’t we just accept that experience is ultimate and live happily inside idealism — a matrix simulacrum? Or why wouldn’t we just let experience fall out of the equation as extraneous, and just keep the content of experience as reality itself? As a matter of fact, this is exactly what most people do. They do it mostly as a way to deal with other people’s nonsensical accounts of their experiences.

But then, for some number of people — perhaps a few and perhaps a great many — one day, everything changes all at once. In an instant, the field of experience expands in a way that is impossible to convey to anyone who has never experienced it. Everything rearticulates itself into a new set of things, new objects, new significances, new possibilities and a new suspicion of apparent nothingness, for it is from nothingness that this rearticulation irrupts, ex nihilo. Everything is never the same and nothing is ever the same. We have now inhabited two fields of experience, and this draws attention to an inconceivable ground of experience that is the furthest possible thing from “objective”.

So much confusion about religion has been caused by convert talk. Those yet to experience conversion cannot conceive what is being spoken about, but cannot help conceiving it anyway within their own field of experience. They take it objectively, and believe their misconception is the truth, or they reject their misconception as false, or much better, and less commonly, as inadequately understood.

Now I am digressing.

I distinguish these two whole-and-part orders.

The atomistic one I call the constructive order, which, starting from the smallest givens, builds and integrates parts into systemic wholes with emergent properties.

The holistic one I call the conceptive order, which, starting from an all-inclusive whole, articulates distinctions into finer and finer parts, each with a wholeness of its own.

Why do I care about two whole-and-part orders? Because I am a designer who straddles the world of subject and object. We must construct systems that function as systems. But these systems should also fit into a context, and make immediate, meaningful sense to people. They must be attuned to and harmonious with an articulate field of experience, so people feel and intuit it without having to analyze what it is, how it works and how it might benefit them.

If they fail to do so — and these days they rarely do — they contribute to making the world more complicated, cognitively burdensome, meaningless and alienating. They fail to connect up with any familiar and immediate sense of a world where we feel at home — a world we can care about and want. They give us a world of inhuman things made of smaller inhuman things that build up into larger and larger units of inhumanity. And we long to dismantle it all, perhaps in order to reassemble the parts into a more equitable and pro-human systematization, never suspecting that it is our own impoverished sense of the whole that produced this state of inhumanity in the first place — which, if given the chance, we will resystematize into something equally dehumanizing.

We need to re-enworld this world together, this time paying close attention to what we perceive and conceive as meaningfully whole, and using these articulations to guide the formation of our systems. We must allow these two orders to inform one another, iteratively.

Subjectivity is far from arbitrary. It is none other than the articulate field of experience, the source of our objectivity. Subjectivity is the mother of objectivity. We must learn to hear her quiet voice and respect her acceptances and refusals of our gifts as we craft our offerings.

Enworldment revolves within a hermeneutic sphere whose center is everywhere and boundary is nowhere, which unifies distinct orders of wholeness and makes them whole.

Plato on technology dependence

Philosophy

In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates hold forth on a new-fangled invention, written language.

SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?

PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard.

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.

And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Highest-level service design process

Design

My service design schtick post distilled into a simple list:

  1. Goals (required for organizational flourishing) — “To help our organization flourish, what do we need to achieve?”
  2. Behaviors (required to achieve goals) — “To suceed, what do we need people to do?”
  3. Motivations (required to produce behaviors) — “How do we get people to cooperate?”
  4. Experiences (required to occasion motivations) — “What experience will provide motivation to cooperate?”
  5. Systems (required to deliver experiences) — “How do we make this experience happen?”
  6. Capabilities (required to operationalize systems) — “What do we need to make these systems operational?”
  7. Activations (required to implement capabilities) — “In what order do we develop the required capabilities?”

Service design’s schtick

Design

Service design’s basic schtick is backwards planning from the human to the technical:

  • from behaviors that make an organization flourish, to positive value exchanges that might motivate these behaviors,
  • from positive value exchanges to good experiences that afford such value exchanges,
  • from good experiences to service operation systems capable of delivering good experiences,
  • from service operation systems to capability requirements that make the operations possible,
  • from capability requirements to initiatives to develop the capabilities and actualize them.

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of business-as-usual, which goes more like this:

  • from ad hoc development of functional capability, as practical needs surface,
  • to hacking together of functions with technical integrations and manual processes,
  • to attempts to patch up the worst customer pain points as they impact the business,
  • to marketing spinning what ensues in order to attract customers faster than they leave,
  • to colliding with the shocking reality that nobody’s motivated to do what the organization needs them to do.

The innovation tragicomedy: Business is never more business-as-usual than when it becomes enamored or panicked or otherwise fixated on some new technology. Everyone starts falling all over themselves in the headlong rush to prematurely answer the wrong question, which is: “How do we leverage this new thing?”

The right question is “What is the ideal for our organization and for the people who make it flourish by choosing to participate in it? How can we approach this ideal more perfectly, or even surpass it, using new capabilities enabled by this new technology?”

Everybody is asking me, “How does AI figure into service design?” They’re asking me because everyone’s asking everyone.

My answer is fairly simple. AI enters the process as another capability. By capability, I mean an enabling role or policy or process or technology.

And capabilities fit in a specific place within a longer sequence of questions — the sequence I outlined earlier.

We ask ourselves, “What do we need to happen here at this point in the service?”

We then ask, “What do we want each person to do? What do we want the customer to do? What do we need our employees to do to get the customer to behave as we hope?”

And we ask these questions through the lens of value exchange: “What are they after in this moment? What are they willing to put into it in order to get it?”

Then we ask, “What are the conditions required to actualize this value exchange? What makes this exchange and these behaviors happen?” This is where capabilities are defined.

And here is where we finally ask what everyone wants to ask too soon: “Can AI make this happen, or help make it happen, in the most effective and efficient way?”

What makes AI a little different is that it appears more as a role or process capability than as a traditional technology. But the good news is that service design doesn’t care much about this kind of blurring. AI can play the role of a person, but without the need to consider value exchange. It doesn’t care what it puts in or what it gets out of the interaction. Depending on context, this stakeless selflessness can seem altruistic or alien, and this should inform whether AI or human agency is the better choice. But the point here is that an AI role, like any human role, is a unit of agency constrained and enabled by role responsibilities, policies, processes and technology. And defining and coordinating agency has been central to service design from its earliest origins as a discipline.

Service design is the design discipline best positioned to help organizations make wise and pro-human use of AI.

The practical urgency to think design

Design, Philosophy

If we are not equipped to think design, we are susceptible to confusing design with other work practices. For example we might reduce design to a set of tools, techniques or skills, or to a role with a set of responsibilities. Or we might tautologically define design as whatever work a designer does. Or we might just outsource the definition to experts — to whoever has convinced the most people to take their word on what design is and does.

But let us assume for a moment that design has an essence — that design is something definite, actual, specific — that some ways of working are not design, or even at cross-purposes with design. What if the tools and techniques designers use can be appropriated by other practices and used for non-design purposes or ideals? What if designers themselves are put to work using their own techniques to serve ideals contrary to design? What if design experts have won their influence — and their right to define design — precisely by abandoning design’s purpose and handing over its techniques to those who misunderstand or oppose design’s ideals?

A busy designer could easily drift out of design practice altogether. Such a designer might feel that something has been lost, but lack concepts and words to account for what has happened. And this compounds the sense of loss with perplexity.

A perplexity is a problem so deep that it defies words and concept — and every attempt to understand it or talk about it induces angst. To avoid the angst, we must avoid confronting the sense of loss. We ignore it or dismiss it or explain it away or deny its existence. But the loss only intensifies, and angst darkens the loss with foreboding.

I intuit a growing opportunity to think design. An anxious and demoralized design community needs language to describe what has happened to us and account for why it has happened. It needs language and concepts to convey design’s importance to business and to moral orders above business, to which business must answer. And it needs practical philosophy that does better justice to design’s own What, How and Why — ideas, practices and ideals — to help designers stay more faithful to their craft.

For so long, designers have blurred, adjusted, adapted, concealed and outright misrepresented how we work and why we work that many of us have suffered the punishment of dishonesty: estrangement from truth itself.

This must change, and on some level, most sensitive designers feel it even if they do not know how to know it.

As gestalt, so system; as system, so gestalt

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Design forms matter in order to make materials serve as an intuitive medium of spirit.

A designer develops two orders of whole-and-part — the articulate gestalt of spirit and systemic emergence of matter — ensouling materials and materializing souls on the middle plane of persons, Man.

Earth — matter behind material — ascends to wholeness, part-upon-part, generating functional modular units of increasing scale, each unit constituting its own emergent qualities.

Heaven — spirit beyond soul — descends to particularity, whole-within-whole, articulating meaningful gestalts of decreasing scale, each gestalt comprising articulate fullness of its own.

Each order is governed by its own iterative craft, each a hermeneutic circle. One constructs systems constituted of parts, each whole a part of something yet greater; the other conceives gestalts comprising articulate parts, each part itself a whole for something yet smaller.

Design conjoins both iterative crafts and brings both orders into unity. Design is the craft of the hermeneutic sphere.

Let other disciplines work one order or the other, thinking theirs the only one. Designers must see them in their difference in order to unite them as one.

A designer is neither artist-oracle nor technician-chemist, but each transmuted by the other in marriage, as they effect transmutation of materialized soul and ensouled material.

Let other disciplines subscribe to metaphysical materialism or idealism. The praxis of design reveals each inadequate alone and and both interadequate only together — always rooted in the mysterious ground of exnihilitive One.

A designer is a true artifex, making marvels of outward technological magic and inward miracles of life — an agent of enworldment.