(This is another unpublished post from September 2023, written while I was studying Husserl. I think I just lost steam and forgot to finish it. It is still unfinished, but I think it is good enough and complete enough to publish as a work in progress. It has only been a few months but the vocabulary proposed here has been working.)

Short version:

Below is an attempt to differentiate and name some modes of intellection important to the field of design. My goal is to balance etymological groundedness, established use, and simplicity to design a system of labeled concepts useful for speaking precisely and clearly about intellection and intelligibility:

• Intellection is a general term for any act of intelligence, regardless of mode.
• Intelligibility is conduciveness to intellection.
• Conception is a mode of intellection: a spontaneous taking-together of a gestalt given.
• Construction is a mode of intellection: a putting-together of givens into a composite.
• Synthesis is a mode of intellection: a simultaneous conception and construal, where a given is conceived and construed together spontaneously as an articulate whole.
• Comprehension is a mode of intellection: a synthesis situated within and integrated with an all-embracing totality.

• Deconstruction is anti-synthesis. It is a type of construal used to dissolve conceived wholes and render them mere constructs. If successful, deconstruction clears ground for alternate conceptions and syntheses.

Long version:

For the last fifteen years or so, when talking about modes of understanding, I have treated conception and synthesis as antithetical complements. Conception was the spontaneous taking of a given as a gestalt. Synthesis was a part-by-part putting together of a composite from multiple givens. Conception was holistic taking-together; synthesis was atomistic putting-together.

Lately, though, I have been considering reshuffling this language, and using “construction” in place of “synthesis”, and using “synthesis” more conventionally, to designate something conceived structurally, a simultaneous holistic and atomistic understanding.

Construction has an apt etymology, as well as mainstream currency and experience-nearness, which is to say, many people conceive its meaning.

We construct assertions, arguments, justifications, theories, taxonomies, systems. We call these constructed structures constructs.

Constructs, once constructed, are understood through construal. We trace the steps of the construction backwards and forward, and we examine the relationships between parts, in order to construe how the construct was constructed.

Understanding, however, is rooted in conception. The basic elements must be conceived, and the relationships linking the elements must also be conceived. Where conceptions are lacking, construals are unrooted, empty, “abstract”.

Sometimes a process of construal causes a construct to “click” as a gestalt conception. Suddenly, the whole and parts are conceived together as a structured whole.

This simultaneous understanding of whole and part together is synthesis. Conception and construal are “put together” as a single articulate understanding of a structure. Articulated means “jointed”. The whole is conceived as a gestalt of jointed parts, each also a gestalt.

Analysis is a process of breaking down something that is not (or not yet) understood synthetically into conceivable elements (spontaneously recognized parts) linked in conceivable ways (such as logic or causality). The process of analysis can sometimes force a rearticulation of reconceived parts within the whole. Sometimes these rearticulated parts can effect a reconception of the whole. (Analysis open to reconception of both part and whole within a synthesis is hermeneutics.)

The denser the conceptions within a structure, the more clearly it is understood. The denser the construals within a structure, the more thoroughly it is understood.

But often a construal doesn’t produce a synthesis. We understand that the construct can be construed if we go through the process of construing it, but the construal still must be performed each time the construct is to be understood. The structure is still experienced as a construct, understandable solely through construal. It is experience-distant — artificial — understood as a construct. The understanding might be thorough, but it is not clear.

Sometimes repetition of construals can gradually, through habit, develop conceptions. We learn to conceive familiar patterns, among parts and wholes, as gestalts. Through familiarization, we gradually synthesize new understandings, and new clarity. This, however, does not mean that familiarization will always produce synthesis. More often it does not, but instead produces burdensome artificiality and alienation from what is conceived as given.

(But the fantasy of familiarization is intoxicating to prometheans with dreams of reinventing humankind, and it seems that no number of catastrophic social experiments is sufficient to sober them up. The lessons learned from such bloody failures last as long as the generations who learned them the hard way.)

Comprehension is the impossible but worthy aspiration to synthesize all of reality as given to our experience. Everything we encounter is conceived as belonging to a whole and the relation between any two parts can be fluently construed within the whole. The effort to comprehend all inevitably shipwrecks on the limitations of one’s conceptions, as beautifully described by Thomas Kuhn.