I’m pretty sure most people welcome having an occupation, because they have nothing else to occupy their time, and human nature abhors a vacuum. Such people cannot comprehend how anyone could mind being assigned a purpose.

*

When people occupy me with tasks they want done according to their defined procedures, or with making products they want made to their defined specifications, that is an occupation of my time, of my energy, of my mind and of my self-identity that I welcome just about as much as a nation welcomes an occupation by a foreign power.

Maybe the etymology of the world “occupation” can shed some light on the essence of its meaning.

ORIGIN Middle English : formed irregularly from Old French occuper, from Latin occupare ‘seize.’ A now obsolete vulgar sense, to have sexual relations with, seems to have led to the general avoidance of the word in the 17th and most of the 18th cent.

That sounds about right.

A question from a couple of weeks ago:

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

One answer: when we approach truth with our ideas, and our ideas are absorbed by truth and seem intrinsic to truth — when our conceptions develop into perceptions — that is when the thinker’s love is requited.

When we insist on imposing our conceptions on truth, and we disregard how we perceive reality and prefer our explanations to our primary experience, truth does not love us.

In other words, authentic metanoia* is the requited love of truth.

Dogmatic faith of the kind that is held despite contrary evidence of perception (isn’t this the popular definition of “faith”?), as much as it pretends to be love of truth, is in fact nothing more than love of one’s own preferred image of truth. And as anyone who exalts this type of “faith” will tell you, truth does not change, and continues to defy and betray us at every opportunity. The truth we experience — the “truth of this world” — is contrasted with the reality of the “world to come” which will not betray us and cannot betray us.

*

Metanoia is a Greek word commonly translated as “repentance”. It literally means “after knowing”. It is a re-knowing of truth that changes one’s relationship to life as a whole, theoretically, practically, morally and aesthetically.

When a problem obviously exists, but clarity to articulate it is lacking, no amount of effort in solving the problem will produce a solution. It only produces more unclarity.

But this does not stop us. We create tons of alternative clarity to distract us. We execute clearly defined processes in clearly defined plans. We produce clearly defined documents. We follow clearly defined best practices. We define objectives, key performance indicators, metrics, scorecards and track to those rather than think about whether the problem (whatever it is) is actually resolved or just ignored.

Anything to avoid struggling honestly with an undefined, unarticulated, yet clearly existent problem. This kind of struggle is philosophy, and very few people care to deal with it, even so far as to admit it is ever valuable, or even necessary.

*

Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”

Philosophy’s response to such situations is to learn — and not learn particular facts, but rather to learn to make sense of the facts that exist, because the problem is not incomplete facts, but how we are attempting to make sense of those facts.

*

If you think about it, philosophy and innovation have a lot in common. They’re both about new and unfamiliar ground — about seeing things in a new way.

*

Occasionally a charitable soul tries to scrounges for something good to say about philosophy, and says “philosophy teaches people how to think clearly” as if it is like logical QA for ideas. But that is an unphilosophical misunderstanding.

Philosophy, when it is actually philosophy, teaches us how to think about things we don’t yet know how to think about. But understanding what “thinking about things we don’t yet know how to think about” means itself requires philosophical understanding. It presupposes a level of insight into how thinking is done, and how thinking participates in our perceptions of the world and our experience of life.

So maybe it would be better just to say: when something’s going seriously wrong but in a way you can’t quite pin down, and nobody can communicate to anyone else without causing unaccountably intense distress, and everyone wants to follow a different course of action for different reasons, but nobody can agree on which reasons are most relevant — hire a philosopher, even if you don’t know what the hell he could possibly do about any of it.

“‘The external conditions’, writes Einstein, ‘which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist…'”

It is interesting that Temple Grandin naturally sympathizes with animals, and through this sympathy has been able to design better experiences for them, while remaining unable to sympathize with “neurotypical” human beings.

With great effort, she has been able to derive rules to help her interact with other people and make sense of their behavior in a highly exteriorized way, resembling a physicist’s understanding of the behavior of matter under different conditions. But for all her diligent observing, pattern-finding and rule formulation, she cannot empathize. She has said that when she is in the presence of “neurotypicals” she feels like “an anthropologist on Mars”.

This offers some clues on the precise difference between empathy and sympathy. It is not that Grandin lacks all capacity for sympathy and intersubjective relationship. She easily sympathizes with animals, in a way many others find nearly miraculous. It is that she is sympathetic only to forms of subjectivity that resemble her own.

“Neurotypical” subjectivity on the other hand has greater capacity to acquire a degree of intuitive intersubjective relationship with people unlike themselves. But this is built on a foundation of sympathy. Neurotypicals intuitively sympathize with the empathic intuition of other neurotypicals. Both parties understand — or assume — that a mutual intuitive understanding is being sought — that each is attempting to intuit the other’s intuition. This assumption is false in the case of Grandin, who has no experience of this kind of mutual coming to understanding, and so she seems strange and can be misinterpreted as rude, and all sympathy is withheld.

*

In my experience, organizations tend to be oblivious to all perspectives other than that of its industry. Some fortunate organizations serve customers like themselves, who already share their perspective. Here, the organization naturally sympathizes with its customers in the way Grandin sympathizes with cattle. Other organizations are in industries so powerful, with so few real alternatives, (such as insurance, medicine, and government) that customers are forced to learn their perspective in order to deal with them. This kind of organization doesn’t have to sympathize.

But other companies differ from their customers and suffer from it. Though they are blind to the fact that perspectival differences exist at all (let alone differ) — they usually become aware of the material consequences of the difference. For instance, they may start to lose market share to more sensitive, responsive organizations, despite having an equivalent offering.

If such companies attempt to acquire an understanding of customers, more often than not they acquire an externalized, rule-based, explicit understanding similar to that of a high-functioning autistic person. That is, acquire only the kind of objective data that Grandin would seek.  Indeed most organizations work very hard to function as autistically as possible. Or to put a more positive spin on it, they strive to be scientific. To the greatest possible extent, they execute according to defined formal processes, guided all the way by validated objective facts. Whatever is “merely” intuitive, whatever cannot be operationalized, quantified and measured, is rejected on principle. Implicit, language-resistant understandings, like tacit know-how, feelings, aesthetic sensibilities and values — precisely the stuff empathy needs  — are filtered out by the processes, or distorted into facts for easier comprehension and handling.

And as a consequence, many organizations begin to take on the personality characteristics of the stereotypical physicist. Their movements are stiff, calculated and unnatural — simultaneously excessively self-conscious and self-unaware. And they also have the same rule-fixations, the same overpowering need for repetition, regularity and predictability that autistic people tend to display. These are not qualities normally associated with charm and charisma.

But no problem. At the last minute, the marketing department comes in and dresses the physicist up in a Hawaiian shirt, slathers his head with hair gel, teaches him teenage hipster slang, and gives him a crash course in pick-up artistry. Off he goes into the world, to acquire customers.

*

If companies wish to learn to empathize with customers, they will have to unlearn a lot of 17th and 18th century philosophical prejudices, and learn the new art of organizational dialogue.

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

*

When we face an enemy, we concern ourselves with the enemy’s mind. Understanding his mind is a means to the end of anticipating his actions. Respecting our enemy makes us stronger opponents.

When we love, we are concerned with actions as a means to the end of understanding someone’s mind. Love pursues the significance of every word and act, for the sake of what is behind it.

Lust, as much as it might resemble love, is actually more similar to the attitude one takes toward an enemy.

When I try to figure out what is worth living for and sacrificing for, I find it hard to put into words. The more the manifest sense of meaning is actually present, the less tempted I am to try.

But I can say with complete certainty that the three grand goals most within reach, the three most tempting answers to the question “Why?”, are false, however satisfactorily solid they feel in the hand of comprehension. These are goals founded on 1) magical speculation, 2) sound biological functioning (a.k.a. health or comfort), or 3) the acquisition of social/political/economic power.

When we offer these goals as justification for our actions we find approval and company in the world, and we find the goals achievable.

What: Facts can be memorized and recalled.

How: Skills can be practiced and used.

Why: Meaning is ephemeral. It comes and goes as it will. We must petition it to return to us.

*

We possess What and How.

Why possesses us.

*

Many of us believe only in What and How.

What and How are always at hand when we reach for them, and the fingers of the comprehending mind can wrap comfortably around them. Why is incomprehensible. According to comprehension Why is nonexistent.

Or sometimes What and How conspire to verbalize Why, and then confound the verbal image with that to which it points.

What and How present a pseudo-why of What I must believe and How I must behave.

“Why?” Because of cause and effect. “Why?” Because this is what works best. “Why?” Because that is how it is. “Why?” Because I said so.

*

Why is heard and felt. Why moves us to words and actions. But Why is never reducible to words or actions.

Why cannot be justified.

Why justifies.

Why is justification.

*

Who — how does this relate to Why, How and What? You’ll rarely see Who discussed when this triad is framed out.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis describes a fascinating psychological phenomenon called confabulation:

A second division was discovered by accident in the 1960s when a surgeon began cutting people’s brains in half. The surgeon, Joe Bogen, had a good reason for doing this: He was trying to help people whose lives were destroyed by frequent and massive epileptic seizures. The human brain has two separate hemispheres joined by a large bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum. Seizures always begin at one spot in the brain and spread to the surrounding brain tissue. If a seizure crosses over the corpus callosum, it can spread to the entire brain, causing the person to lose consciousness, fall down, and writhe uncontrollably. Just as a military leader might blow up a bridge to prevent an enemy from crossing it, Bogen wanted to sever the corpus callosum to prevent the seizures from spreading.

At first glance this was an insane tactic. The corpus callosum is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, so it must be doing something important. Indeed it is: It allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity. Yet research on animals found that, within a few weeks of surgery, the animals were pretty much back to normal. So Bogen took a chance with human patients, and it worked. The intensity of the seizures was greatly reduced.

But was there really no loss of ability? To find out, the surgical team brought in a young psychologist, Michael Gazzaniga, whose job was to look for the after-effects of this “split-brain” surgery. Gazzaniga took advantage of the fact that the brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres — left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left’s mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body. Nobody knows why the signals cross over in this way in all vertebrates; they just do. But in other respects, the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being “right-brained” and scientists being “left-brained”).

Gazzaniga used the brain’s division of labor to present information to each half of the brain separately. He asked patients to stare at a spot on a screen, and then flashed a word or a picture of an object just to the right of the spot, or just to the left, so quickly that there was not enough time for the patient to move her gaze. If a picture of a hat was flashed just to the right of the spot, the image would register on the left half of each retina (after the image had passed through the cornea and been inverted), which then sent its neural information back to the visual processing areas in the left hemisphere. Gazzaniga would then ask, “What did you see?” Because the left hemisphere has full language capabilities, the patient would quickly and easily say, “A hat.” If the image of the hat was flashed to the left of the spot, however, the image was sent back only to the right hemisphere, which does not control speech. When Gazzaniga asked, “What did you see?”, the patient, responding from the left hemisphere, said, “Nothing.” But when Gazzaniga asked the patient to use her left hand to point to the correct image on a card showing several images, she would point to the hat. Although the right hemisphere had indeed seen the hat, it did not report verbally on what it had seen because it did not have access to the language centers in the left hemisphere. It was as if a separate intelligence was trapped in the right hemisphere, its only output device the left hand.

When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres, things grew weirder. On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that “goes with” what he had seen. The patient’s right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, “I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain.” Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, “Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on whatever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self’s behavior. For example, if the word “walk” is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, “I’m going to get a Coke.” The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

Science has made even stranger discoveries. In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person’s conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person’s own neck and tries to strangle him.

These dramatic splits of the mind are caused by rare splits of the brain. Normal people are not split-brained. Yet the split-brain studies were important in psychology because they showed in such an eerie way that the mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Split-brain studies are important for this book because they show in such a dramatic way that one of these modules is good at inventing convincing explanations for your behavior, even when it has no knowledge of the causes of your behavior. Gazzaniga’s “interpreter module” is, essentially, the rider.

*

My current interest in confabulation is related to the everyday conflict I observe in the business world between linear, rational, formal processes (left hemisphere thinking) and nonlinear, informal creative processes (right hemisphere thinking), and the tendency for left hemisphere thinking to explain successes very much in terms of its own contributions, even when the success has little to do with them — or even despite them.  I am thinking about the role of administrators in education, the role of process in research and creative ideation.

One thing that I find nearly impossible to get across to some people is that I never theorize for the sake of theory.

My thinking is urgent. I am trying to find ways to articulate realities that lack language, but which have a deep impact on the quality of my life.

For the majority of people, if you can’t talk straightforwardly about something, it is “subjective”, which means it is non-existent, and outside the bounds of reason. Where words are lacking, no appeals can be made.

My suspicion and hope is that many people experience these realities, but do not experience them as true, because nobody realizes that anyone else experiences them. The same realities sit mute inside all of us, denied all social existence.

Or, sometimes they find a sort of social existence in the realm of literature. There people intimate sharedness of such experiences, but nothing is done to establish them socially, because to do so necessarily coarsens them. But the belief that what is discovered in art, belongs forever in art is to keep our infants imprisoned forever in the nursery out of fear that the weather will toughen their skin. The infant skin of indirect expression must, if it is to have life in the world must toughen up its hide with words that can refer to shared conceptions of roughly analogous realities. And yes — it loses its suppleness and its specificity, but that loss does not come without compensatory gains. As Ricoeur pointed out, polysemy is not a simple lack of precision, but is essential to language. It seems almost cynical to say it, but it might be that the popularity of an idea depends not only on the ability for people to understand it, but also to misunderstand it. It is this that gives it its range. (It is the failure to appreciate the necessity of this misunderstanding that has made so many religions granulate over theological differences.)

Art speaks very specifically about particular things — things that have escaped notice, but which have become significant to the artist — and in doing so inaugurates its reality as something (to some degree) shared. Without shared specific realities, no general realities — no truth — can be conceived, and nothing can be said of it that makes sense to anyone.

We speak to one another about sadness and anger and love all the time, and understand well enough what these words mean, and to refer to them is socially consequential. But whose sadness or anger or love is identical? To find finer identities or to be shown as-yet-unfamiliar nuances of these experiences we go to high art. (To not find them, and to stay strictly within the realm of our own familiar experiences we go to popular art. * See note below.)

So, yes, I know a philosophical handling of delicate things makes them tougher, cruder, more brutish. But this is what it means to mature into something that can survive in a tough, crude, brutish world, and it also represents a fresh infusion of relative suppleness, fineness and humanity to the world outside of art. Art’s loss is the practical world’s gain. And art is inexhaustible, unlike the practical world. Without the perpetually newness of art’s realities the practical world degrades into senility that is somehow simultanously sterile and lecherous.

We need fresh realities.

*

Philosophy’s job: To usher inarticulate realities ordinarily found only in art into the practical world.

Picking up the baby trope again, philosophy plays the father role, and art plays the mother role. Art brings young experiential realities into the world, nurtures and protects them while they are small, delicate and vulnerable. Philosophy prepares them for eventual independent life, but the mother doesn’t want to let them go.

*

(* NOTE: To not experience the as-yet-tacit — to get the easy, reassuring, reinforcing repetition of the same we consume popular art. The more we live in a popular world and experience things by way of popular expression, the more we all start to see and feel the same. The great value of Facebook is that we no longer just consume popular expression, but participate in it by producing it. This is much more effective way of learning as any constructivist educator will tell you. We live differently when we compose the story of what we are living as we live it. Facebook holds the promise of gently and painlessly eliminating the need for art by simultaneously quietening both the creative impetus and the receptivity for new experiences.)

Merleau-Ponty, from Phenomenology of Perception:

Now there is indeed one human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to stand in the full light of truth: this act is perception, in the wide sense of knowledge of existences. When I begin to perceive this table, I resolutely contract the thickness of duration which has elapsed while I have been looking at it; I emerge from my individual life by apprehending the object as an object for everybody. I therefore bring together in one operation concordant but discrete experiences which occupy several points of time and several temporalities. We do not blame intellectualism for making use of this decisive act which, within time, does the work of the Spinozist eternity, this ‘original doxa’; what we do complain of, is that it is here used tacitly. There is here a de facto power, as Descartes put it, a quite irresistibly self-evident truth, which, by invoking an absolute truth, brings together the separate phenomena of my present and my past, of my duration and that of others, which, however, must not be severed from its perceptual origins and detached from its ‘facticity’. Philosophy’s task is to reinstate it in the private field of experience from which it arises and elucidate its origin. If, however, this de facto power is used without being explicitly posited, we become incapable of seeing past the rending of separate experiences the phenomenon of perception, and the world born in perception; we dissolve the perceived world into a universe which is nothing but this very world cut off from its constitutive origins, and made manifest because they are forgotten.

I’m finding many parallels between Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of falsification of perception and misconceptions of conception that I’ve witnessed. For me, this is not a theoretical problem, but a practical one. To confuse conception with concept is to fail to understand the conditions by which conception can occur.

Ideally, we would all have a place in the world. What each of us is (role) and who each of us is (way of perceiving, conceiving, feeling and acting) would coincide enough that the world would give us a purpose as it took from us our kind of service.

Because of the implicit philosophy we have inherited from three centuries of alienated thought, we no longer have any expectation that this is possible or permissible.

We’re all social deists. We believe that the clockwork of “how things are” will — and must — play itself out according to its own mechanical principles. We’re all as skeptical as scientists with no trust in good faith, but only in inescapably compelling proofs. We believe only when someone is able to force us to believe.

The fact that a moral vision of life cannot be formed in these conditions only proves that moral visions are merely subjective imaginings.

*

People who hate philosophy hate it because they are loyal to a philosophy.

Hostility toward philosophy is actually hostilities of philosophies, in the plural.

(Actually, a philosophy that exists without awareness of other philosophies is not really a philosophy, but a totalistic conception of experience, a pre-philosophy.)

*

A philosophy is a totalistic conception of experience that knows that it is a totalistic conception of experience, and which, therefore has a transcendent background placed behind it: the possibility of consequential otherwise. Out of concern for this otherwise, it self-examines and attempts to make itself explicit.

A totalistic conception of experience that does not know that it is a totalistic conception of experience — or suspecting it may be, does everything it can to suppress full recognition of the fact — and which grasps no background beyond itself: the universe.

*

A philosophy that exists without knowledge of other philosophies is as real and invisible as a subject who exists without knowledge of other subjects.

An autistic person is unaware of subjects beyond himself because all that exists to him is his own subjectivity, and this results in a world of objects.

The Enlightenment was the submergence of humankind in collective autism.

*

Around each philosophy is a stretch of hellish oblivion known as perplexity.

Part of why we do not want to acknowledge other philosophies is out of fear of perplexity.

Perplexity corresponds to the state of chaos into which each infant is thrown at birth, which slowly articulates into a world.

*

Babies are born into perplexity. That is why they cry.

*

If someone claims enlightenment or rebirth or being “born again” ask what their death was like, and about the limbo they endured as they emerged from chaos into this new world they inhabit. Because this is how to distinguish transfiguration of the world and subsequent metanoia from a mere change of opinion about the world and how one ought to behave in it.

*

We cannot live as human beings until we transcend the vision of the Enlightenment.

We cannot transcend the Enlightenment until we become willing to endure perplexity.

But we will not become fully perplexed until we start listening to one another and learning. Learning means to redraw the outlines of our knowledge: to reconfigure our gists.

But according to the Enlightenment we already know all we need to know in outline. And to believe this is to preclude learning. This is the circular life of the Enlightenment, and of all stable philosophies.

Every thought thinkable by a solitary individual has already been thought. Future thoughts will arise from the efforts of individuals thinking beyond their own limits with others, and those thoughts will not be comprehended by any one individual. The thought will be something in which the individual participates, and its knowing is one of knowing how to participate in the thought, in it is not graspable by the five fingers of the mind.

Reason is the lingua franca of intuitions.

Break us down to the infinitesimal element, of which all thing are constituted, we are alike. Take us together as constitutive of infinity, we are one.

We identify with extremes of scale when we feel overtaxed and weary and need need relief from incessant betweenness. In our mind, which is a place of its own, we burrow into dust to dissolve among quarks or to fly into heaven and see ourselves converge to zero from the vantage of beyond. Both are ways to desituate ourselves; to stand apart from where we always are.

The same operation can be performed with time, identifying with the deep past and distant future, and again with our existence between the chthonic animal instincts at our roots and the transcendence of mundane life.

We become escapees and exiles from the center, our prison home.

*

None of us live at extremes of space, time or self. We can’t even touch them. We are suspended between them, and experience them purely through their tension.

For us, there is only tension, and from that tension fixed points are interpreted.

*

Reality is not in entities but in relations. The entities follow from the relationships, but the mind seizes them and commits its characteristic ontic error. They are thinged.

*

An object can be comprehended. Our participation in the world is incomprehensible.

Each brick holds in its heart the heat of the kiln.