Reality is an articulate whole we inhabit.
Reality is myriad interacting things among us.
Reality is participation with our fellow inhabitants.
We participate in realities beyond our comprehension.
Interacting things unite and divide.
The whole can rearticulate in shocking ways.
Reality is not what we think it is.
Things can be otherwise.
We are not who we think we are.
A problem is coming into view for me.
For the last two decades, it has seemed true to me that we have three fundamental factors that shape our being:
The first factor is intuition, and intuition’s “object”, everyday, immediate givens — those real entities we encounter and interact with in the course of our practical lives. Do we have a clear conception of these givens, that allows us to relate this particular given to other givens? Or is our intuition purely tacit recognition that lies dormant in oblivion until it spontaneously recognizes and responds to some given, and then recedes back into oblivion? All encounters with entities around us, whether conceived or merely recognized, are given to experience. Intuition is the faculty of immediate givenness.
The second factor is will — our own motivated response or nonresponse to what we experience. Do we ignore or attend? If we attend, do we merely observe or do we respond? If we respond, do we respond subjectively by adjusting our understanding or attitude, or do we try to respond objectively by changing that which we experience? Or do we do both at once, and interact — alternating fluidly between acting upon and being acted upon? All response, whether ignorant or attentive, whether observational or active, whether inward, outward, or both is will.
The third factor is metaphysical attitude — our sense of reality and our own place in it and our relationship with it, to it, within it. In fact, it might be the essence of our metaphysic what preposition we prepose when relating self to beyond-self. This metaphysical attitude is an implicit faith, which might or might not be articulated as a metaphysical doctrine, and that articulation might be a faithful expression of the implicit faith or it might be in conflict with one’s implicit faith, which means it is held in bad faith.
This is my best understanding of the great triad. The source of intuitive givens is Earth, who is Prakriti, who is Shekhinah, who is the Virgin. The source of reality within whom we exist is Heaven, who is Purusha, who is Keter, who is YHWH. Between is Man, who is the Ideal Person, the polycentered heart of the world, and the schlub who is each of us.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught: “Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: ‘I am a speck of dust,’ and on the other : ‘The world was created for me.’”
If we manage to change our metaphysical attitude, it changes also our intuition and our will. I am talking here about metanoia.
This is not the same thing as coming to authentic articulation of a faith that was misrepresented in bad faith.
Nor is it that more common, much worse reverse case, where we adopt a bad faith that allows us to make coherent articulates sense of things, and share it with others around us — but at the cost of fidelity to our implicit faith and our intuitions. We gain the world(view) but lose our soul (our intuitive and metaphysical connection with reality). This bad faith dooms us to clearly and compellingly positing things rooted neither in our experience nor in our sense of reality.
I am talking about shift in how we tacitly situate ourselves in reality, due to a shifted tacit understanding of reality, a shifted tacit understanding of self and a shifted tacit understanding of relationship between this new self and new reality.
My problem is: In the metanoia experience of rebirth as a new person in a new reality, is it better to think of it as new conceptions — new receptive faculties affording new realities to which, before we were oblivious due to lack of receptive faculties? Or rather, is it registering novel ordered stabilities emerging from the chaos and instability of unordered experience, which we did receive but could not order?
Is metanoia more like being blind but now seeing? Or is it more like becoming able to make out murky forms we see in the shadowy fog? I’ve been inclined to see it as the former.
(This post is notes to myself. If you read it — and you are welcome to — you are reading as an eavesdropper. Something is troubling me badly. It is the best kind of trouble, which is why I have been chasing it around it with my philosopher’s stone. Just this year I’ve chased it through at least six gnarly books and through at least six dozen excruciating conversations.)
Wisdom is practical understanding of first-person being.
Wisdom is practical understanding. The understanding manifests in practice. To convey it, it must be demonstrated. It cannot be given by explicit propositional language.
An understanding that manifests in practice is an ability to act in some intentional way. It is not knowledge content. Practical understanding, though, might use knowledge as a means or support in its practice. We sometimes call such knowledge “wisdom”, but this badly confuses matters. A wise person’s knowledge (or a wise tradition’s knowledge) is an instrument, not the wisdom ability itself. Just as possessing a guitar does not make one a guitarist, possessing a wise person’s knowledge does not make one wise. One must have an ability to do the practice — play a guitar if a guitar is available or act wisely if an occasion for wisdom arises.
The practice in question is a participatory practice — participation in first-person being.
First-person being is not nearly as simple as our everyday working notions of I and we suggest. Practical understanding of this complexity — manifested as participation in first-person in its full complexity — is essential to wisdom.
Wise participation is first-person is participation in a subjective manifold comprising one’s own first-person singular being (I), other persons’ first person singular beings (fellow-I, a.k.a. thou), within transcendent first person being plural (We).
(We is a complex and elusive kind of being about whom we know little, but about which we unwisely believe we know perfectly well. We don’t even know how to know it, because when we try to know we approach it as objective immanence, when the everse approach is required. We is essentially participatory and transcendent, not objective and immanent. This is the most radical category mistake, and it forces any believer in its grip into the unwise either-or of a relatively decent atheism or an indecent fundamentalism.)
The understanding exists as a capacity for this kind of participation, which emerges if the occasion for such participation presents itself.
Let’s return to the role of knowledge in wisdom. We have established that wisdom is not knowledge. We have also established, however that some knowledge can be instrumental to wisdom.
It is also true that we can state true propositions about wisdom. As wisdom is not knowledge, a true proposition about wisdom is not itself wisdom. But knowledge about wisdom can be instrumentally useful to wisdom. And an act of using instrumentally useful knowledge about wisdom can be wise. In this case, wisdom is manifested in the speech act, not in the content.
Philosophy, at its best, is the attempt to demonstrate wisdom by stating true propositions about wisdom that are instrumentally useful to wisdom, and its wisdom is demonstrated in its attitude toward wisdom as something inexhaustibly transcendent. We don’t possess wisdom, we love wisdom, and we love it by desiring its beyondness, wisely pursing wisdom beyond our current ability.
This is the structure of love: Love is transcendently oriented, loving past what is objectively given, toward a subject who forever eludes our possessing, comprehending grasp, a semi-mysterious person we know essentially through our shared participation in We.
To covet what is objectively given, or to value only the experience of what is given, is mere lust.
What do we call a person who acquires, collects or distributes wisdom facts and wisdom tools, while neglecting the development of wise practice?
A lot of wisdom happens without the use of knowledge.
Many wise people cannot tell you many facts about their wisdom.
They just act wisely when the occasion calls for it.
Others gravitate to forms of wisdom that involve knowledge. It is easy to automatically conflate them with knowledge fact and knowledge tool hoarders, but it is unwise to do so.
The test is the same: can these knowledge users act wisely with their knowledge when the occasion calls for it?
Some people learn some wisdom, but unwisely conclude from this that they now possess wisdom. They were ignorant in thinking they knew — but now they know that they really know. Others who resist their new knowing resist ignorantly. They too only think they know.
It would be wise to ask if perhaps one still only thinks one really knows. Or better, that knowing must be something other than we have conceived it.
But instead one becomes foolishly, arrogantly and presumptuously wise like a new religious convert, or like a university student who has learned just enough to be dangerous, or like a new initiate in a compelling new conspiracy theory, or like a fanatic drunk on a comprehensive political ideology that finally makes sense of everything.
A fool possessed by a conceit of wisdom is called sophomoric (sophos– “wisdom” + -moros “foolish”).
A fool with a head full of wise content is somehow even more foolish than an empty-headed fool.
I’ve been taking an online course on designing online courses. If that isn’t meta enough the online course I am learning to design is on design.
My course will be an introduction to service design, meant to introduce people who are contemplating or preparing to participate in a service design project how to think about and talk about service design, so they can feel comfortable with the idea of embarking on a service design project and participating in the process.
I’m putting the tentative outline of the course here, just in case anyone is interested:
Lesson 1: What is design?
Lesson 2: What is a service?
Lesson 3: What is the value of design?
Lesson 4: Good experiences in general
Lesson 5: Good service experiences
Lesson 6: The six dimensions of service
Lesson 7: A typical service design project
Lesson 8: Some core tools of service design
Lesson 9: What it is like to participate in a service design project
Lesson 10: How service design can help you
Looking for an old post about the difference between the day sky and night sky (which is another way to say yin heaven and yang heaven), I did a search for the word “azure”. I stumbled into a post from earlier this summer, and I actually enjoyed re-reading it: “Sermon on the Distributed God”
The appropriators of Hebrew scripture and faith read all the terrible things the Jews say about themselves or relate God saying of them, and rejoice in their own superiority.
These successor religion believers could never act like those vicious patriarchs in Genesis, or the wicked persecutors of prophets, or those hypocritical Pharisees.
The secular inheritors of the Judeo-Christian morality beg to differ. All those various religious fanatics of the past did all kinds of injustice and violence in the name of God. They were clearly out for themselves, and using God as a way to delude themselves and others.
But the modern secular moralists, having rejected all the sketchy doctrines of the past, could never act like those fanatics and mistake themselves for moral when acting in their own self-interest. They’ve found ways to objectively, methodically, scientifically neutralize their deepest biases and motivated reasoning. And therefore, they alone ought to teach and administer justice, and those who oppose them should be suppressed.
To me, those people capable of recognizing and acknowledging their wisdom failures are wiser than those who still have not discovered the unwisdom in their wisdom — (not to mention the injustice in their justice, the unfairness in their fairness, the violence in their compassion, the error in their truth, and so on) — still have some collective growing up to do.
I’m sticking with the stiff-necked fuckups of God.
I am clearly in a serious perplexity. It is very painful, but the pain feels promising. It is manifesting as increasing impatience at being condescended to. Some are people who seem to me manifestly unqualified to condescend. They know something important, but they seem unaware of how much remains beyond their understanding, and how crucially important that beyond is. Others are possibly qualified. They might have important knowledge beyond mine, but I’m frustrated with our relationship — but perhaps because they are perplexing me with something as-yet inconceivable to me. The interference between the two possibilities is jamming me up. Plus I have some scary medical stuff going on, and that’s intensifying my already excessive intensity.
Here is my current attempt at resolving this perplexity…
A while back I began reflecting on the Golden Rule, and came up with the idea of Golden Rule Prime.
At its surface, the Golden Rule is a pretty terrible rule. Do to others as you would have others do to you. So you would have others serve you the disgusting food they themselves would like to eat, or have you listen to the terrible music they prefer? Who would want that?
But if we note that very fact, and run it back through the Golden Rule again, we get something much better. What would we like better? We would like others to serve us the food we ourselves like, or play the music we ourselves prefer. This iteration of the rule is Golden Rule Prime.
But even Golden Rule Prime is not quite right. Maybe we are not hungry, even for our favorite food, or maybe we are not in the mood for any music however much we normally love it. What would we like better? If we run this back through the Golden Rule again, we get something even better. We would like someone to check with us on what we want and then respond to what we tell them, or something along the lines of asking and responding to the person, instead of speculating or guessing. That would be Golden Rule Double Prime.
With each iteration the Golden Rule yields a deeper principle, approaching a moral asymptote, which I believe is absolute and not attainable. And with each iteration we presume less that we know better (or ever can know better), and put ourselves more on equal footing with others — who we must involve in our decisions if they are to be good ones
I am inclined to see wisdom as a function of this approach. How many Primes can you actively intuit in your dealings with others, how aware are you of the remaining unclosable distance between your own understanding and the intersubjective reality of the situation, and how ready are you to involve others in your effort to reduce that distance?
I’ve been reflecting on the word “philosopher” recently, and wondering why Socrates might have felt a need to coin a new word instead of just being a new variety of sophist. Why “lover of wisdom”?
This seems connected with the myth of the Oracle at Delphi identifying Socrates as the wisest man in Athens for knowing how little he really knew.
Is loving wisdom connected with awareness of the limits of one’s own thought?
I link this with the understanding that when love a person, we must not confuse that with loving our idea of who a person is.
We must love her semi-mysterious being who is forever beyond the limits of cognition, who will never stop surprising us. Yet we do know her more than our mere our cognition knows, in a directly intuitive way. And that intuitive knowing has something to do with participating in a shared being with her.
In love, our own subject subsists within another greater subject, and our being participates in this greater being.
Wisdom seems connected with this capacity to participate in reality without needing to reduce to reality to thought — to think toward a reality known to transcend thought.
Unwisdom — sophistry — is to confuse our thoughts of reality for reality itself.
We think we love a person but instead love our own idea of a person.
We think we worship God but instead we love our own mental image of God.
We think we know who we are, but we don’t know how to know the kind of being we have in order to know it. We grasp some identity — a category of object — instead of participating in our own way as our selves.
Participatory being is subjectivity, and objectivity is its product, not its substance.
As long as we must cognize everything objectively before we will know it as real, we will remain unable to know ourselves, other people, or God. We will be cursed with the Midas touch of objectivity, and be unable to nourish ourselves. We will be nihilists.
I entertain the possibility that Socrates saw that the consequence of sophistry was nihilism.
And now I am wondering if the purpose of Socratic interrogation is to get people to realize how much they are able to do perfectly well despite lacking the? ability to account for it with explicit thought?
“Dunning-Kruger” is only four syllables, which is an advantage over the nine syllable “metacognitive incompetence”.
“Hubris”, however, is two syllables, and “pride” is just one.
People often ask what I do for a living. I dread this question. Because I answer “service design.” To which they very reasonably ask “What is service design?” To which I find myself unable to give a succinct, clear answer.
My succinct unclear answer is “I am a sort of win-win engineer.”
While this doesn’t come close to answering the question, it does get things rolling in the right direction.
If the person seems sincerely interested I might continue with some un-succinct clarification. “I try to help organizations set conditions where anyone who deals with that organization, whether as a customer, or employee, or leader, or partner, or whatever — anyone who participates in the activities of the organization — benefits from their interactions, while also benefitting others.”
Years ago, a friend and I had big plans to start a “But what is it?” blog in order to showcase companies who explain the benefits of some offering of theirs, but who completely fail to give any sense at all of what the offering actually is. I bring this up because I am painfully aware of the fact that, so far, my explanation of service design is exactly the kind of thing that butwhatisit.com existed to ridicule.
So let’s put some nouns under the lovely benefits. What is service design?
Service design is a design discipline that focuses on improving how organizations create and deliver value, both internally and externally.
Besides committing the sin of circular definition, there are few nouns shakier than “design”. Half the world is confused by the word, and the other unconfused half misunderstand it. The matter of what design actually is will be dealt with later. For now, I will make things even worse by elaborating on the “create and deliver value” part.
The word “value” might be even shakier than “design”. It is certainly very general, and vague. But it is general and vague for the very best of reasons: value exists in myriad forms, and only a word as general and vague as “value” can cover them all.
Obviously, one form of value is money. When value takes the form of money it becomes easy to quantify, track and manage. Service designers definitely want to help organizations make money, but in this respect, we are no different from any other vendor a company might hire.
The difference comes from the other forms of value that service design helps organizations create and deliver — the more qualitative forms of value — and how many of these forms of value service design seeks to create coordinate and deliver.
Qualitative value can be in the usefulness or desirability of a product, those qualities that motivate someone to buy it.
Qualitative value can be the convenient or timely availability of products.
Qualitative value can be a helpful act of assistance that saves time or effort or stress.
Qualitative value can be useful information, or clarity on some murky or complicated matter, or a mind-blowing epiphany that makes you rethink everything.
Qualitative value can be feeling nourished or refreshed by beauty or elegance, or charmed by humor.
Qualitative value can be reassurance, or a kind word, or a sincere smile.
Qualitative value can be combinations of these various good things all at once, adding up to a good experience.
Qualitative value can be consistently good experiences over durations of time, resulting in a deepened, warmed or strengthened relationship that is valuable in itself. It feels good to have strong loyalty to a brand who has always done you right, and that is valuable.
It also feels good to work for an organization that does its customers right. This kind of organization is often also the kind of place that does its employees and partners right — and encourages employees and partners to do each other right, while doing right for their customers.
Even though these qualitative forms of value can be harder to quantify, track and manage than money is, they are the human reality that is the very root of value. Without these qualitative values, money will not be made.
And without qualitative value money would have no value at all. What good would even the largest quantity of money be, if there were no qualitatively good things to purchase with it? This was the hard lesson King Midas learned when he discovered that his magical touch that turned every qualitative reality into a quantum of gold, was not a blessing, but a curse.
This a paradox: What feels most real, concrete and factual from a management perspective is actually an abstraction of what seems vague, squishy, intuitive and arbitrary — but which are the realest realities of any organization. The hardest facts of business are the least concretely real. The softest, vaguest, touchy-feeliest aspects of business are what drive the behaviors that help a business flourish or make them fail.
So how do you manage these unmanageable factors that make or break your business?
By now it should be clearer what service design exists to do. Service design helps organizations coordinate to produce and deliver all these various kinds of qualitative value as effectively and efficiently as possible.
But how? This brings us to design. But I’ll have to go into that later.
What I’ve written above might end up part of a course I am working on. Please give me feedback if you have any. Thanks!
I am finally getting around to reading Husserl’s Ideas. I should have read this long, long ago. He already developed the language I’ve needed to say what I most need to say.
One important capability of phenomenology — in my opinion, the most important capability — is this: a phenomenological attitude permits us to port an enworldment across multiple differing metaphysical platforms.
The need (which is more often than not nothing less than a compulsion) to maintain compatibility with one metaphysical platform will narrow the range of ideas we are willing to entertain and develop, as well as the range of intuitions and perceptions we take seriously. Consequently we risk neglecting or rejecting regions of being crucial to our humanity.
Not every truth will play nice with an ultimate reality built with the materials of physics, or with a universe spun from divine love, or with a realm of manifested archetypal forms — but we might need those truths anyway, say, if we want to make an electronic device, or to cure a disease, or to feel healthy empathy for our neighbor, or to know viscerally that our life has purpose, or to account for mathematic’s miraculous ability to find order in the most chaotic of chaos, or to be bound to others within binding truths — all at once, all within the same life.
Maybe the first principles of metaphysics should come last in our understanding of our human — all-too-human — condition.
I’m giving a designer friend of mine a beautiful, perfect gift, and it’s got me thinking about gifts, again. I just looked up my old posts on gifts, and two of them have held up pretty nicely.
Wicked problems are collective perplexities.
What the world needs more of is teachers of what everyone already intuitively knows.
From the perspective of a learner — the most important perspective to both learner and teacher — learning what you already intuitively know is the most inspiring kind of learning. — “I always knew this but could never say it, before!” —
We feel relieved, dignified, liberated, restored, empowered when we learn this way. We feel grateful without feeling humiliated or indebted, because nobody gave us anything that was not already ours.
Everyone loves this kind of learning.
Plato called it anamnesis: unforgetting.
From the perspective of our social existence, anamnetic learning liberates private intuitions from solitary confinement within the skulls of individual persons, and brings it out into the light of shared understanding.
It socializes private knowing and allows it to participate in public knowledge.
I mean social and public in a positive sense. For many of us, the words “social” and “public” taste sour in our mouths. They imply imposition of unwanted burdens, constraints, exposure, artificiality, impersonality, de-personalization — alienation. But it has not always been this way. The ancients experienced public life very differently, and maybe in a different way that is partially recoverable.
The difference is preserved in the lonely etymology of the word “private”. Privare meant “to bereave, deprive, rob, strip”. Private means deprived of public existence.
Looking at the word “social” offers us clues into how Roman citizens may have experienced society. Socialis — “of companionship, of allies; united, living with others; of marriage, conjugal,” from socius “companion, ally.”
Is it possible that anamnetic teaching could help restore a non-alienating society, where living and working together in public affirms what we know and love most immediately?
Could we ever abide in a self-affirming, other-affirming, world-affirming common truth — a truth rooted in the soil of our souls, but growing upward as public knowledge, branching out as specialized practical expertise, efflorescing as culture, fructifying as teaching?
This is the stuff of utopian dreams, but I think it is a truth-bearing fantasy.
I imagine my younger daughter would laugh at me for being such an extreme Aquarius. But I am actually feeling it right now, and even as I see the wrecking ball of the day ahead swinging right for my skull…
Learning to teach is helping me shed the burden of intellectual avarice. What seems deeply true to me is not mine. It’s not me. Truest truth should be everyone’s. The value of truth is actualized in the sharing of it with others.
One of the world’s most cloying day camp songs:
Love isn’t love
Until you give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Love isn’t love
Until you give it away
You end up
Having
More
I’m making myself throw up, now. Have a good day.
Changes in what we believe matter only when they change how we believe.
And changes in how we believe matter most when they change why we believe.
Changes in why and how we believe matter because they change not only the content our beliefs but in the very conceiving that engenders beliefs.
These changes reach deep behind the content of thought, and fundamentally reshape our experience of the world and our selves within the world. The deep reach is depth itself.
The givens of experience, the immediate intuitions preceding words — the givens that call words to mind, the givens that sometimes leave us speechless, the givens that address us and call forth a response — …these immediate givens change in ways that are literally inconceivable prior to their advent. Epiphanies burst into the world from nowhere, making the imperceptible nothingness that saturates reality suddenly conspicuous.
Yes, in changing our conceiving, beliefs do change.
Yes, in changing our conceiving, behaviors do change.
Yes, entertaining new beliefs and trying new behaviors, does sometimes change our conceiving.
Yet, to change our beliefs and behaviors is not, in itself, to change our conceiving.
When we entertain something new or we try something new, we offer these things to ourselves, to see how our deeper self — our intuitive self — our faith — responds to them.
Are we willing to respect the judgment of faith? Can we respect it, anymore? How do we experience its acceptance or rejection?
If we habitually neglect our faith, or overrule it, or talk over it, or argue it into submission, or misrepresent it, or imprison it in theories — (these are things we all do to some degree or another) — how can we even experience it at all? It is easy to succumb to bad faith — and replace faith with logic, consensus, fantasy or, in cases of mass-delusion, all three at once.
When we invent an idea and consider it, what are we doing?
We are offering that idea to our soul.
Will our soul embrace the idea with conception? Or will our soul hold the idea at arms length, conceiving only its elements and its logical cohesions, but repelling the organic whole?
When we conceive on the whole, and we conceive each part, and we conceive the relationship of whole-to-parts and parts-to-whole — that is when we understand.
Our conceiving is our being.
Our beliefs and our behaviors are symptoms of our being.
Conceiving our conceiving indirectly, by noticing spontaneous changes in our beliefs, behaviors, perceptions, emotions, values — our whole experience — our very objectivity — in response to what we entertain and try and accept at the deepest levels — changes everything, literally.
But we must get beyond the content and the forms and the objects — objectivity — and learn to know the subjectivity who conceives objectivity.
We must completely reconceive the relationship between subject and object.
Once we understand that a personal subject — a subject like me or you — is a subject in the same sense as an academic subject — one of myriad possible ways to know, experience and participate in reality.
A subjectivity is known by its fruits — the content of its enworldment.
I just had one of those creative conversations, where I was moved to say things I didn’t know I knew.
I found myself saying, “Intersectionality is true in a deep sense. Our existence is radically intersectional. But it is not an intersection of social categories. It is an intersection of love relationships — participation in transcendent being in which we experience our personal being.”
I also related this with an old thought: “In my meandering journey through atheism, I learned to disbelieve in many different notions of God. Though I’ve found an understanding of God I cannot even doubt, my past atheisms all survive in me. I still disbelieve in every one of my rejected notions of God.
“Years ago, when my daughters came to me and proclaimed their atheism, I asked them what it was they disbelieved in. They would explain, and I’d say ‘Wonderful! Definitely refuse to believe in that!'” To have a healthy faith, it is important to disbelieve everything you find unpersuasive
I also realized last week, talking with another friend that the notion of institutional racism is rooted in a legitimate intuition that there are institutional personalities. Our participation in these collective forms of being — these egregores — do, in fact, change how we perceive, think and respond to the world, and not always for the better.
But to change the collective personality of an organization requires profound structural changes — changes in how participants in the organization interact and exchange service with one another. Attempting to change the mindsets of all the people within the organization, and worse, doing so through coercive means, will only create new forms of institutional oppression.
The organization must be redesigned to make people naturally want what is better for everyone. The most effective way to change an organization’s personhood is service design.
A conversation with yet a third friend gave me a third insight. Identity crises are an essential part of young adulthood. In youth, we outgrow the roles we are given by our parents and seek new ones. And this role is almost always a category of some kind or another that we share with others we see as our people.
My friend reminded me how, in our profoundly musical generation we adopted music genres and specific bands as our identities. When we met someone else who loved our music we knew something about their ideals and behavioral norms. We were very protective of these identities, scorning poseurs who tried to appropriate our style. If we’d found a way to defend the boundaries of our identities with coercive force, perhaps we would have done it. But adults barely noticed what we were doing and even if they had, they would never have indulged our feelings of ownership over the borrowed foundations of our selfhood.
Young people today favor different categories, and unfortunately many of these identities have been politicized and are enforced by nominal adults in positions of authority.
But it is important to remember, those who are still in this stage are doing their best to establish their selfhood. We cannot condemn them for that. But as adults we have a responsibility to help them mature past this stage.
One there was a Christian emperor who enjoyed unlimited power over his dominion.
His spies had infiltrated every corner of his holy empire.
If anyone spoke against the emperor or defied his will, they would never do so again.
This Christian emperor, however, was deeply bothered.
He read in the Gospels that the first would be last and the last would be first, and that the meek would inherit the earth. He understood that the powerless were privileged in the eyes of God, even when — especially when — they were scorned by society.
The emperor, of course wanted to be first. He wanted to inherit the earth, and to pass it down to his heirs. Most of all, he wanted to bask in God’s approving gaze. But alas! He could only do so if he became last and meek and powerless.
After extensive inner work, the emperor found a solution: He renounced his power, and proclaimed himself powerless. And having renounced his power, he could now become an ally of the meek, scorned, oppressed and last in rank.
And the emperor’s spies and court also renounced their power, and joined the ranks of the powerless.
Anyone vicious or ignorant enough to defy the emperor or any of his powerless allies would be called out and brought before the tribunal to confess the corruption of their judgment and to renounce their unjust abuse of power.
In this way, the emperor empowered the marginal and powerless, and for the first time in human history created conditions of justice for all who deserved it.
For better or worse, my own mind is radically wired for vision.
I understand that this is generally true for all human beings. Our species’s primary sense is sight, and our visual processing apparatus, relative to other animals, is hypertrophied. But experience has demonstrated to me that I rely on visual intelligence more heavily than most. I use the visual mode of understanding for cognitive functions other people might (and maybe should) assign to linguistic or logical or even kinetic intelligence.
My over-reliance on visual intelligence allows me to understand things other people miss, but it also makes me mentally incompetent wherever visual intelligence is the wrong tool for the job. Luckily, visual intelligence is a flexible instrument, and I’ve gotten it to do all kinds of things it shouldn’t. But where it fails, I fail. And it fails in some pretty simple workaday competencies that people reasonably assume is basic to adult functioning, where nobody even suspects failure is possible. Polite political euphemisms normally obscure painful truths, but applied to me “differently abled” is revelatory.
Anyway!
I understand reality in geometric and topological terms. I do this despite knowing that this necessarily introduces distortions, blindness and nonsensical noise and artifacts into my understanding. I try to rely on “complementarily abled” others to compensate.
And a central operation of understanding for me is eversion.
I recently read in a trusted source that inside-outside is the primary relationship the horizontal, worldly plane, and that above and below is the relationship on the vertical plane. I can’t decide if this means that I am unconsciously trapped in a horizontal mode of understanding, or if eversive knowing (eversivity) is a synthesis of verticality and horizontality.
Weird post, I know.
Thanks for reading.
(I live on that magenta line.)
Last week I realized several important things about service design.
First, the modus operandi of service design is to create conditions for summoning and sustaining benevolent collective being (a.k.a. egregores). We arrange the roles, the rules and the material artifacts required to receive a collective animating spirit in which those receiving, delivering and supporting services participate. I cannot talk this way in a professional setting, but knowing this helps me feel the full importance of my work.
Second, I am realizing that one effective way for me to explain what service design does it do point out the contagiousness of feeling. The best strategy for ensuring any one person has a good experience is to ensure that every person has a good experience. A miserable clerk will darken a customer’s experience. And too many miserable customers will sour a clerk’s experience, and over time, it will sour their life, and that clerk will darken the experience even of cheerful customers. Only by baking mutual benefit into our social systems can we ensure that the primary contagion passed in our interactions is good moods.
Third, in any organization, the less direct control it has over the behaviors of its customers, employees and partners, the more it can benefit from service design.
All design is an appeal to freedom. Design assumes choice — the choice to attend or ignore, the choice to select or reject, the choice to cooperate or rebel, the choice to invest or divest, the choice to advocate or denigrate, and so on. Only organizations with coercive power over people do not need design.
Wherever an organization must persuade, design can help. Design helps organizations understand what is persuasive to those people it wishes to persuade, helps it produce the most persuasive options, and helps it ensure that these options stays the persuasive option available.
The design industry has gotten pretty good at producing persuasive options for particular types of people. Witness the prevalence of X disciplines. UX (user experience), CX (customer experience), PX (patient experience) are established industries. Employee experience and citizen experience are becoming more common.
But now, increasingly, organizations face the challenge of designing for multiple types of people. To make it even more complicated, these types of people often interact with each other, on behalf of the organization, but not under its control. Think about platforms like Uber or AirBnB who mediate services exchanged between providers and receivers, but whose brand depends on the quality of these service exchanges. The organization cannot directly control what happens, but must instead create conditions where each participant in the service benefits by benefitting the other.
Organizations who must compete for employees, motivate them and retain them, while simultaneously competing for customers, are also in this boat.
Organizations who produce a product that is a component in a partner’s service, whose product is experienced in the context of this service are in this boat.
Organizations who produce a product but who depend upon partners to present, recommend, distribute, deliver, install, customize or support that product are in this boat.
Organizations who coordinate networks of partners to achieve some greater good are in this boat.
Elected officials who oversee public services, whose careers depend on the votes of an alert, informed, critically-engaged public should be in this boat, at least in theory.
When an organization finds itself in this general position, where it must persuade multiple kinds of people to interact with one another in mutually beneficial ways that support the goals of the organization — that is when service design is most valuable.
I’m thinking about all these things because I am working on designing an online course called “What the Actual Hell Is Service Design?”
Etymologically, to comprehend means to grasp-together.
What does “together” comprise? It is the new object of knowledge together with the existing body of knowledge.
In comprehension, new and old knowledge are grasped together and integrated.
Not all forms of knowledge can be grasped together. Whenever we comprehend some matter, some remainder of the matter refuses to be integrated.
The remainder that is left out of comprehension we call “irrelevant”.
The remainder that remains, but which can’t integrate, we call “contradictory”.
The part of comprehension that is intentionally integrated through a mental assembly process we will call “synthesis”. Etymologically, to synthesize means to put-together. Syntheses are held together with logic, causality, hierarchy or other formal organizing principles. This is the stuff of theory, epistemology and logic.
The part of comprehension that is spontaneously integrated through spontaneous intuition is concept. Etymologically, to conceive means to take-together. What is conceived is taken-together as a given. This is the stuff of ontology.
Sometimes when we synthesize a new idea from an assembly of ideas, the new idea is spontaneously intuited as a whole, so we comprehend it both as a synthesis and as a concept. Or sometimes when we carefully examine a concept and disassemble it into components we find that the components are each intuitively conceived. The components can now be disassembled and reassembled both synthetically and conceptually. When we know this way, we understand through “analysis”. Etymologically, analysis means loosen-up.
When we are able to analytically loosen a synthesis up into concepts, then re-synthesize the parts into a concept whose conceptual sub-components remain visibly present as parts of a whole, our understanding is “articulate”. Etymologically, articulate means to separate into joints.
Ultimately, all understanding, whether conceived or synthesized or both, is developed up from givens, which, as explained above, are taken as givens. But we can only take what we have capacity to conceive. Anything we cannot conceive, even if it is real and actually present is inconceivable, and we are oblivious to it. Etymologically, oblivious means smoothed-over. When we are oblivious to something, not only is nothing there, but the nothingness is smoothed over, so nothing is missing. The thing exists, but to us, it is non-existent.
All of this is theoretical knowing. And it is only one kind of knowing.
Theoretical knowing that conceptual knowing is only one kind of knowing is one-third of wisdom. As philosophers would say it is a necessary condition of wisdom but not a sufficient condition.
Practically knowing how and morally knowing why conceptual knowing is only one kind of knowing is the other two-thirds of wisdom.
Wisdom is known in our hearts, felt in our souls and done with our strength.
But even wisdom is not enough.
Wisdom must also be wisdom that loves, because love is our participation in being in whom we are only part — an organ — together with others who, with us, are participants in a being who sustains us as who we are. When we love our spouse, this is our participation in the being of our marriage . When we love our friend, this is our participation in a friendship. When we love an organization, we participate in the life of a group who sustains who we are as a person — a member — an organ of this living whole.
These wholes in whom we participate are inconceivable and incomprehensible in theoretical terms. We can certainly theorize about the limits of theoretical knowledge, as I am presently doing, and it can be helpful (which is why I am doing it) but it is insufficient.
Without threefold loving wisdom that not only conceives, but also does and feels, we are oblivious to the beings in whom we participate, and we remain oblivious to the Being in whom our own being and all being has being.
Obliviousness to the the Being in whom our own being and all being has being is atheism. We say with Bertrand Russell “I have no need for that hypothesis” without recognizing that belief in God not a matter of theory.
We must wisely love beyond the limits of ourselves, with the entirety of our hearts soul and strength, and this is actualized by loving our fellow participants in being and in Being.