An ethic is a living system of principles to which a group of people adheres in order to preserve an ethos.

*

An ethic is a living system of principles…

An ethic is holistic. A principle is meaningless and valueless apart from the ethical system to which it belongs.

A single principle cannot be removed from the system and applied individually in disregard of the rest. Each principle is an organ of the whole ethic.

An ethic is not reducible to a list of rules or laws, any more than a living body is reducible to a pile of organs and parts. The whole works together or it dies.

An act which conforms to one principle but contradicts another principle within the same ethic is not ethical. An act answers to every principle of the ethic and supports the ethic, or it violates the ethic and undermines the ethos.

*

…to which a group of people adheres…

If you belong to the group and make ethical appeals to (or demands from) others, you must answer to those same principles when others makes an ethical appeal to you. This is the fundamental principle of all ethics and therefore it is the principle of principles: the golden rule.

Adherence means you can be counted on to conform to the ethic, and in return you can count on others. If you are unfaithful to the ethic, you lose your right to make appeals.

Essentially it is an agreement, a shared understanding, a promise. If others feel you are betraying that agreement, it is not enough for you to believe privately that you are righteous. You must justify yourself, or the agreement breaks down.

People who think “sticking to principles” is an excuse to offend their neighbors (other members of the ethos), or who even go as far as to take pleasure at the offense of others as evidence of their “unyielding integrity” are radically wrongheaded and undermine the ethic with their ignorance.

To be ethical means to make appeals to one another, confer and deliberate with one another and come to ethical agreements, and to avoid the use of legalistic coercion.

*

…in order to preserve an ethos.

The fulfillment of an ethic is an ethos: a way of being in the world, seeing the world and participating in the life of the world. This ethos is not contrived in any way. It is not consciously interpreted.

The ethos is simply what the world spontaneously is when one lives according to its ethic. It is not a configuration, but a transfiguration.

An ethic is only as good as the ethos it promotes. The ethos is the fruit of the ethic, and it is by the ethos that the ethic should be judged.

Power hierarchies are reinforced through fear of blame on the part of followers and acceptance of blame on the part of leaders.

These hierarchies function best when the leaders recognize the essential truth of blame and followers do not.

If leaders are ignorant of blame, they fear it, cannot assume it, and tend to cheat their followers out of their follower’s right: blamelessness.

But if a leader understands blame, he will assume the blame himself and play the scapegoat. He will allow his followers to redeem their guilt for a measure of work. The followers are then able to move more freely and operate more effectively. They have little to lose, now that their consciences have been guaranteed.

But if followers understand blame, they’ll require more substantial compensation.

What would happen if leaders understood blame even more poorly than their followers?

*

I’m just thinking about General Patton, whose men reputedly believed they could not be defeated as long as they were under his command.

Thoroughness of analysis affords freedom of synthesis.

The more finely articulated the understanding, the more pliable the response.

*

The concrete mind which accepts the initial appearance as the sole vision, glances off the surface of possibilities.

The abstract mind knows how to disassemble not only the objective components of a thing, but also the subjective qualities of a thing that hold it together and make it what it is.

This dissolution of essence arouses the utmost anxiety, but if one can endure it, one is able to work with the maximum latitude to discover compelling, unprecedented and literally unimaginable possibilities. The anxiety is warranted. Objectivity can take an object apart into smaller parts, each itself an object.

When subjectivity takes subjects apart, one’s own subjectivity comes apart with it, which means one’s world destabilizes and dissolves, and one must take it on faith that new unity will happen.

At some time every child has taken apart a toy and been unable to reassemble it. What guarantee do we have that if we take ourselves apart that there will be a self left to self-reassemble?

*

Notice the passive language around new unities.

Objectivity can stand at arm’s length and actively assemble systems. Subjectivity discovers unities in its experience. Subjective creation is not planning and building. Planning and building occur once subjectivity pulls the blueprint down from the ether and simply sees what can be. Only after the vision has been occurred may one plan and build back up into the sky. Cut straight to the planning as most of us do, the edifice will collapse into incoherence.

*

Human beings are impatient and fearful by nature. We hate what envelops and involves and transcends us. We like what we can grasp in our hands and master and consume. The truth that we are mere organs of the world, participating in its life, moved by the world, yet moving in the world among the things of the world, as one of the things in the world, yet also as the world itself.

No, thanks: just give me the things. Give me a tree, a piece of fruit, a block of stone. Give me plans. Give me guarantees. Give me repetition of past success.

*

Tell me where this ship is sailing and I’ll sail with you to unknown continents.

It required far more faith to discover America than to execute the plan to land on the moon. Scientific eyes have trouble seeing that fact.

What makes Thomas Kuhn’s ideas on the history of science so important and exciting to intellectual non-scientists is this: he shows that scientific discoveries are not final metaphysical facts. In actuality, what is discovered are patterns of  recurring phenomena within particular conditions (which are themselves phenomenal). We can describe and predict this regularity using various kinds of models, most notably mathematical models.

The practical consequence of the discovery is this: more than one model is capable of adequately describing or predicting the same phenomenal occurrence.

One can discover one scientific truth, and be completely right about what was discovered, but to regard the discovery as a discovery of the truth — the only possible scientific conception of what was observed — is groundless. Science does not deal in absolutes. Science is relative in a rigorously disciplined, non-arbitrary way, and its right to be considered true rests entirely on its rigor, never on the intuition that it might or must be true.

An idea that has not been subjected to scientific torture testing is not to be considered false, it is to be considered either 1) scientifically hypothetical if it is testable through the methods of science, which means it must be falsifiable, or 2) extra-scientifically possible if it is not testable through the methods of science, and/or not falsifiable. The proper response to the former is experiment and submission to the results of the experiment. The proper response to the latter is to take it as a matter of opinion, which does not mean to confuse it for non-truth.

There are more forms of truth than scientific truth, but these forms of truth stand outside of science’s domain. If they set foot inside science’s domain and fails to follow the scientific method that idea is a crimes against science, and should be regarded as crimes against mind. Or if you prefer religious language — a sin against spirit. The principles of coming to agreement on the phenomenal world are foundational to coming to any kind of agreement. The scientific method is the foundation of reasonable dialogue. Without reasonable dialogue there is only coercion, dominance, slavery, evasion, deception or violence.

So — Where does science end and these others begin? What is the relationship between science and these other forms of truth? And what exactly is the nature of these truths? What subject or object do extra-scientific truths represent?  And if scientific method cannot establish their truth or false hood, what  standard of truth holds? In other words, are they reasonable truths discussable and resolvable through dialogue?

These are damn interesting questions, and they are also worth asking for practical reasons. What this means is that if a person presents a distasteful, depressing or otherwise demoralizing picture of a situation which requires a distasteful, depressing, demoralizing practical response and succeeds in supports the position scientifically, one is not forced to invalidate their science if one wishes to present an alternative vision and response.

The delusion that a truth is the truth requires only that someone establish the truth of their own proposition to get their way. If one establishes he is right, no further discussion and deliberation can be brought to a end, because by doing so he has also established that all dissent is wrong by definition because it is contrary to the truth. Kuhn blew that up.

Fact is, two opposing true conceptions can conflict, and if one takes the conflict seriously (as science does), an entire community is led toward fuller conceptions of truth that can partially negate but unify and inter-extend the competing ideas. (See my old post on dialectic.) Further, the negations can open up new possibilities and expose new fertile ground for thought. And often that new fertile ground opens new ethical possibilities as well: new ways to see the world and exist in the world — a new ethos.

At bottom, this is the promise of Kuhn. The fact that the world or some piece or aspect of the world looks closed, permanently settled and dark, does not mean that it will not soon be shown to be otherwise. Someone has to see that otherwise first, and that someone is invariable challenged, if not attacked or persecuted.

And I would add, even if a thinker is shown to be dead wrong in his hypotheses, if he sticks to his principles and his hypothesis dies honorably by them he still deserves utmost honor.

*

One place where these principles are supremely useful is in design. Many times people think they are seeking the solution to a problem of some kind. This means the first solution conceived that holds up under scrutiny must be the solution that was sought. Further, once a complete picture of a solution to a chaotic problem is presented the solution invariably seems retroactively inevitable. But anyone who has done a great deal of design knows that this does not mean that another equally inevitable-seeming solution was not possible. Further, one of the other possible solutions might have virtues the first discovered one might not. And one of these virtues might be that the solution somehow magically seems to be not only viable and inevitable but also intimately on-brand, or on-brand in an exciting inspiring way. In other words, a design sometimes opens up and reveals the brand ethos of a company in a deeply compelling way.

So often I’m the pain-in-the-ass on a project who says: “Yeah, this will work, but we do not love it, and we do not love it as a manifestation of this brand I have learned to love.”

WARNING: This is really, really rambling. It gets better toward the end, though.

*

For whatever reason I am finding Yeats’ conception of the tinctures very helpful in thinking about brand.

Here is how I would express what I see as the fundamental problem of business today: Business tends to radically separate the tinctures, thinking almost exclusively in primary terms internally and antithetical terms externally. Business wishes to do the will of its customers and shareholders, and so it 1) sets aside its own will and adopts an externally defined mask, and 2) concentrates on applying its collective creative mind to understanding and influencing the body of fate.

Here is what I believe has happened: the positive vision that we call “the American Dream” — a potent fusion of images and hopes — that powered the post-war economy began to dissolve in the 60s as its concrete aspiration were realized, but at the cost of still-unrealized hopes, much as youthful expectations are simultaneously fulfilled and denied by marriage, children, etc. As Heraclitus said: “Nature loves to hide.”

This kind of disillusionment is normal and healthy, if it is not misdiagnosed as a sign that things have gone horribly wrong. The married couple can stand in their new life enraged or dismayed at their dashed expectations as disappointed youth, or they can accept the fact that they have been seduced to adulthood, and accept their next spiritual assignment. This next assignment is the gradual dawning of the insight that this is the very form spiritual assignments take: You pursue something you want, but when you succeed it’s nothing like what you thought it would be. It’s good in an unexpected way, and what you expected is absent or no longer relevant.

The Persian poet Rumi said it well:

Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

Most people balk at their assignments. Some become disillusioned, angry and cynical and refuse to go forward. Others go into denial and pretend that their expectations were fulfilled, or they keep their disappointment private, or they become very loud advocates of their old ideal to the rest of the world… and then they treat this refusal to accept the new assignment as an act of great spiritual heroism, staying the course, refusing to waver… faith. (I saw a great La Rochefoucauld quote this morning: “That which the world calls virtue is usually nothing but a phantom formed by our passions to which we give an honest name so as to do what we wish with impunity.”)

*

I think the United States is collectively entering the disillusionment of early adulthood. Half of us are pissed as hell and are tempted to reject business altogether as something intrinsically shallow, artificial, filthy, vicious, exploitative, etc. The other half of us know our work lives suck pretty horribly, that it asks way too much of us — more than we have to give –, that it may never fulfill us more than it depletes us, but we think that’s only because we’ve fallen short, have failed to put enough into our careers, that we haven’t “gotten off our lazy asses”, or maybe we fear we don’t have what it takes, or some other personal failing that we should take full responsibility for and not blame the world, etc.

So what’s the next assignment? I think we’ve got to take a hard look at a fundamental question that my own troubled generation has always specialized in asking, to which we’ve always demanded real answers to: WHY?

The answer we’ve always gotten: BECAUSE.

When we were kids we had the luxury of responding back: MEH.

We were scolded for being “apathetic” and scolded again for being apathetic toward about our scolding. I’m still proud of refusing to dignify pure phoniness with cooperation or even full-on defiance. We just sort of stayed away from it.

But now we’re the adults, and the pat-answering adults who cruised through the post-war USA prosperity and hope are now cruising into luxurious retirement along with their answers, and we’re out in the work world holding it all together purely our of habit, anxiety and fear of shame, without any of the cheerful delusions that used to make it all worthwhile, or at least not excessively depressing.

If we want anything better than this, we’re going to have to stop waiting around for the cosmic cycle or the Invisible Hand to restore us to prosperity and happiness. I think that force that turns the wheel is crapping out inside us, in our own wills. I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to re-examine our lives, especially our work lives and our work ethics, and discover in them something worth working for, suffering for, living for. The negative motivators are not nearly enough to power our economy, and I’m flaky enough to believe that our economic depression is a collective psychological depression.

We’ve been trained our whole lives that doing things for no reason except that we’ve been told they’re good is what makes us virtuous. “Ours is not to reason why, but to do or die” etc., etc. That might have been true at one time, but this nonsense is killing us, now.

It is irresponsible to fail to ask Why.

*

We’re used to looking for objective, functional, quantifiable answers to the question “Why?” As long as we continue to answer that way we will not have an answer.

I find these questions exciting.

This is why I’m always going on and on about brand. I think the answer to our malaise will have a lot to do with brand. Imagine your company as something akin to your favorite brand or sports team…

From yeatsvision.com:

• Will ‘or normal ego’ is described, in A Vision A, as ‘feeling that has not become desire because there is no object to desire; a bias… an energy… the first matter of a certain personality-choice’ and, in the words of A Vision B, it ‘has neither emotion, morality nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how windows open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything that we call utility. It seeks its own continuance’, and is an instinct for life and survival.
• Mask is ‘the image of what we wish to become, or of that to which we give our reverence’, or the ‘object of desire or idea of the good’, and it only has meaning if there is the desire of the Will.
• Creative Mind is consciously constructive intellect with memory from before birth of ideal or Platonic forms; it potentially ‘contains all the universals’ and implicitly seeks to understand through generalization but needs materials with which to work and create its order, so that if it were isolated from the other Faculties it would be indiscriminate in its impressions since lacking direction.
• Body of Fate is the internal representation of ‘the physical and mental environment, the changing human body, the stream of Phenomena as this affects a particular individual, all that is forced upon us from without, Time as it affects sensation’; it has greater independent meaning since it is the personal, constituent fragment of the general reality, and ‘the visible world is the sum of the Bodies of Fate of all living things’

Part of Edwin Muir’s review of Yeats’ A Vision from yeatsvision.com:

The account of the journeyings of the soul after death, or between one incarnation and another, are equally real or unreal; we give pretty much the same kind and degree of belief to the one as to the other. The division of history into great days, all related to the wheel, all determined by that awful geometrical revolution, is just as impressive and as remote as the rest. Mr Yeats’s vision is a religious one; it has touched his heart, as his poetry shows; it is the vision of a man in love with perfection and impatient of imperfection. The religious vision of Western Europe, thought at its highest a structure of inconceivable complexity, can be understood by the simplest mind, for it implies throughout certain simple facts of experience: the knowledge of imperfection and desire for perfection, the knowledge of death and desire for immortality. This simplicity seems to me to be quite refined out of Mr Yeats’s plan, and that plan is perhaps more than anything else an object of æsthetic pleasure. What a powerful one it is can be seen from reading some of Mr Yeats’s greatest poetry, such as the magnificent sonnet on Leda included in this volume. It may be, after all, that the communicators merely wanted to give him metaphors for his poetry.

*

Yeats – “Leda and the Swan”

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

This pair of passages from Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human seem to address the same problems as Yeats A Vision. We confuse two domains of truth (sometimes pointedly, as if on principle) collapsing the related but distinctly different realms of scientific fact and moral ideals into a single “objective truth”, which makes peaceful resolution of practical conflicts impossible.

29. Drunk with the odour of blossoms. — The ship of mankind has, one believes, a deeper and deeper draught the more heavily it is laden; one believes that the more profoundly a man thinks, the more tenderly he feels, the more highly he rates himself, the greater the distance grows between him and the other animals — the more he appears as the genius among animals the closer he will get to the true nature of the world and to a knowledge of it: this he does in fact do through science, but he thinks he does so even more through his arts and religions. These are, to be sure, a blossom of the world, but they are certainly not closer to the roots of the world than the stem is: they provide us with no better understanding of the nature of things at all, although almost everyone believes they do. It is error that has made mankind so profound, tender, inventive as to produce such a flower as the arts and religions. Pure knowledge would have been incapable of it. Anyone who unveiled to us the nature of the world would produce for all of us the most unpleasant disappointment. It is not the world as thing in itself, it is the world as idea (as error) that is so full of significance, profound, marvelous, and bearing in its womb all happiness and unhappiness. This consequence leads to a philosophy of logical world-denial: which can, however, be united with a practical world affirmation just as easily as with its opposite.

30. Bad habits in making conclusions. — The most common false conclusions of men are these: a thing exists, therefore it is legitimate. Here one is concluding functionality from viability, and legitimacy from functionality. Furthermore, if an opinion makes us glad, it must be true; if its effect is good, it in itself must be good and true. Here one is attributing to the effect the predicate “gladdening,” “good,” in the sense of the useful, and providing the cause with the same predicate “good,” but now in the sense of the logically valid. The reversal of the proposition is: if a thing cannot prevail and maintain itself, it must be wrong; if an opinion tortures and agitates, it must be false. The free spirit, who comes to know all too well the error of this sort of deduction and has to suffer from its consequences, often succumbs to the temptation of making contrary deductions, which are in general naturally just as false: if a thing cannot prevail, it must be good; if an opinion troubles and disturbs, it must be true.

We permit our moral ideals — the image of a world that we feel ought to exist — to distort what we think about the world as it actually is, as it would look to us if we were simply trying to explain and predict phenomenal events. Just as often we turn around and adopt a moral stance of resigned passivity, crushing our moral ideals in the iron maiden of “that’s how things are”. We call this “realism”, ignoring the fact that mutability is just as real as stability.

We lack the courage for meliorism: taking responsibility for our own morality. And by this, I do not mean we take responsibility for success or failure in executing on an already-known morality. I mean: we take responsibility for outlining a moral ideal, attempting to persuade others to it, succeeding or failing to maintain one’s faith in this ideal, succeeding or failing to bring one’s ideal about in practical fact, and finally in fully owning the sweet and bitter fruits of one’s efforts.

The moral nature of the world might be set from the start, built right into reality like physical laws, but why should we expect it to flow out from the world of objects to us? Why wouldn’t it flow out into the world of objects though us? After all, isn’t morality (the sense of a better and a worse) primary to human nature?

And if the moral form of the world must flow out through us if the world is to have any moral shape at all, wouldn’t the modesty and obedience and resignation of our so-called religious folks be euphemisms for moral negligence, indifference, irresponsibility, infantilism?

Yes, it would.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians

Yeats:

In an antithetical phase the being seeks by the help of the Creative Mind to deliver the Mask from Body of Fate.

In a primary phase the being seeks by help of the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask.

*

When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Mask is the effect of the Creative Mind of opposite phase [i.e. the Mask’s phase] upon that phase; and the False Mask is the effect of Body of Fate of opposite phase upon that phase. . . . When Will is in primary phases the True Mask is the effect of Body of Fate of opposite phase upon that phase; and the False Mask is the effect of Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase.

…

When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase; while the False Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase, modified by the Body of Fate of that phase. . . . When the Will is in primary phases the True Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase, modified by the Body of Fate of that phase; while the False Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase modified by the False Creative Mind of that phase.

Santayana:

The various recurrences of a sensation must be recognised as recurrences, and this implies the collection of sensations into classes of similars and the apperception of a common nature in several data. Now the more frequent a perception is the harder it will be to discriminate in memory its past occurrences from one another, and yet the more readily will its present recurrence be recognised as familiar. The perception in sense will consequently be received as a repetition not of any single earlier sensation but of a familiar and generic experience. This experience, a spontaneous reconstruction based on all previous sensations of that kind, will be the one habitual idea with which recurring sensations will be henceforth identified. Such a living concretion of similars succeeding one another in time, is the idea of a nature or quality, the universal falsely supposed to be an abstraction from physical objects, which in truth are conceived by putting together these very ideas into a spatial and permanent system.

Here we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin of the two terms most prominent in human knowledge, ideas and things. Two methods of conception divide our attention in common life; science and philosophy develop both, although often with an unjustifiable bias in favour of one or the other. They are nothing but the old principles of Aristotelian psychology, association by similarity and association by contiguity. Only now, after logicians have exhausted their ingenuity in criticising them and psychologists in applying them, we may go back of the traditional position and apply the ancient principles at a deeper stage of mental life.

Association by similarity is a fusion of impressions merging what is common in them, interchanging what is peculiar, and cancelling in the end what is incompatible; so that any excitement reaching that centre revives one generic reaction which yields the idea. These concrete generalities are actual feelings, the first terms in mental discourse, the first distinguishable particulars in knowledge, and the first bearers of names. Intellectual dominion of the conscious stream begins with the act of recognising these pervasive entities, which having character and ideal permanence can furnish common points of reference for different moments of discourse. Save for ideas no perception could have significance, or acquire that indicative force which we call knowledge. For it would refer to nothing to which another perception might also have referred; and so long as perceptions have no common reference, so long as successive moments do not enrich by their contributions the same object of thought, evidently experience, in the pregnant sense of the word, is impossible. No fund of valid ideas, no wisdom, could in that case be acquired by living.

Harmony: ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from Latin harmonia ‘joining, concord,’ from Greek, from harmos ‘joint.’

Articulate: ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from Latin articulatus, past participle of articulare ‘divide into joints, utter distinctly,’ from articulus ‘small connecting part’

*

Heraclitus:

The bones connected by joints are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole. To be in agreement is to differ; the concordant is the discordant. From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness comes all the many particulars.

*

Chuang Tzu:

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”

If you are out to persuade, “pick your battles” means not trifling with those who pick fights and pick nits.

*

Persuasion requires hospitality, but some people will only admit a guest who kicks down the door. For them the hospitality occurs retroactively, as the host closes the door behind the intruder with exaggerated graciousness. Eventually the host locked inside the house will be the guest who knocked at the door.

*

We should be less patient with the impatience of the executive. He wants us to make our point within 90 seconds, using familiar words defined the normal way.

The executive wants his intelligence flattered by being exposed only to thoughts he could have had himself.

*

A person should be smart enough to understand those who depend on him, but stupid enough to be dependable.

Twitter makes a pretty good anvil for hammering out aphorisms.

If your environment is agreeable, you can read disagreeable books. Critical reading is a luxury of a suitable life.

If your environment is disagreeable, you will need to read agreeable books and gain allies for critical living.

(listen to James Dickey reading this poem)

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and, from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnawing head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibers from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire, the elk’s
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing
Thing,” with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die
Out.

Analogy – ORIGIN from Greek ana– ‘up’ + logos ‘word, reason.’

Category – ORIGIN from Greek kategorein “to accuse, assert, predicate,” from kata- “down to,” + agoreuein “to declaim (in the assembly),” from agora “public assembly.”

Criteria – ORIGIN Greek kriterion, from krites, “judge”, from krinein, “to separate, judge”

*

Analogy is the principle of comparison: the bare recognition that “this is like that” that precedes verbalization and action. It is above (ana-) words and reasoning (-logos).

The analogy manifests in named categories, which is a labeled analogy. The analogical recognition is pulled down (cata-) from private perception to the sphere of shared meaning, the judging public (-agora) and given a name.

When the analogy is dissected and analyzed (ana– ‘up’ + luein ‘loosened’) the parts understood as essential (Latin essentia, from esse “be”) to the analogy are called criteria of the category.

At this point, something strange often happens. The holistic sense of likeness experienced in the analogy is dismissed as a mere hunch that the category existed to be discovered. And what is the discovery, essentially? The category reconceived as a judgment determined by atomistic criteria.

The whole exists only nominally, and the category is taken to be essentially the constituent criteria. The engendering experience is forgotten.

*

What that name of a category finally designates is only what is perceivable by the public. Often the original experienced analogy does not survive the vulgarization (Latin vulgaris, from vulgus “common people.”) of community (Latin communitas, from communis , “common”) thought.

The subtler and more elusive the experience — the more it demands of the perceiver — the more the meaning of the category will be degraded (Latin degradare, from de– “down, away from” + Latin gradus “step or grade”) and leveled down to the lowest common denominator (Latin denominat– “named,” from de– “away, formally” + nominare ‘to name’ (from nomen, nomin- “name”).

The mechanism of the degradation is the analysis of the category into criteria that the public is equipped to recognize. The elusive whole sensed in the originating analogy is picked apart into common pieces, then those common pieces are reassembled into the “true” category which was formerly “glimpsed through a glass darkly”. And this “true” category, having no standard of fitness to the original whole, displaces it.

*

If commerce is going to take over the entirety of culture — and it seems to have no idea how not to — it is going to have to learn to accommodate forms of truth it has always automatically discounted in its accounts of reality because it found them difficult to dissect into objective units it could count.

If commerce cannot figure out how to understand wholes, and behaves as if it is only responsible for maximizing its own growth, it will continue behaving like a cancerous cell that maximizes its own growth at the expense of the living body.

How would a cancer justify itself? It would probably measures its own success in terms of growth.

*

Some people have an intense aversion to being categorized. Is this cat-agoraphobia? — fear of having one’s being pulled down (cat-) to the level of what the public can recognize and label? It’s a form of agoraphobia on the intellectual plane.

A couple of days ago friend of mine sent out a group email with a link to a Slavoj Zizek lecture on youtube.

Apparently Zizek’s incessant nose-wiping/grapping/touching was distracting to some of the recipients: “I checked out the video but abandoned it after the guy grabbed his nose for the 15th time. ” “Is that guy coked out or what? It makes it hard to follow. I’ll look for the transcript.”

I attempted to defend Zizek with this email:

Most people can simply wish to not gross people out, and that is sufficient to inhibit nasty nostril wiping behaviors, but you’ve got to remember that Zizek’s a philosopher. Before he can empathize, he’s got to establish a basis for subjective alterity, and clarify the meaning of an experience of disgust that is not one’s own —  possibly a form of disgust not analogous what he feels when he uses the word “disgust”. Then he will probably be absorbed for some time wondering what an analogous experience even is, whether “analogous experience” is even a valid concept. Then he has to figure out the practical and ethical implications of causing an other to feel disgust. Why not inflict disgust? And are you actually inflicting it? When one person “causes” a feeling to arise in the other, is this not a different kind of causality than that used in the physical sciences? Or is all causality the same species of reification? Species…?

That’s a lot of work. It’s probably too much thinking to ask a professional philosopher to do for free. It’s sort of like asking a professional psychologist friend for free counseling.

To which a member of the group replied:

I can see how an intelligent man might become so self absorbed that he uses some sort of rarefied vocabulary to deeply analyze a series of related propositions before being distracted by something “really important” like religion (being sarcastic here).  –But before I commit large blocks of time to such things, I have to be convinced that I’ll get a good return.  His writings and video both turned me off within seconds.  In fact, while watching the video, I had largely made up my mind during the elitist introduction.  It doesn’t sound like you’re a big fan of Zizek either.  (I think you were making fun of him.).  Should I be concerned about the opinions of this man?  Also, are there no good synonyms for such words as “reification” and “subjective alterity?”Unless you’re a mathematician, if you really have something worthwhile to say, you can probably say it fairly simply.  I think I prefer natural philosophers–like Darwin.

To which I replied:

I’m making fun of Zikek, and all philosophers, but respectfully. Really, I am making fun of the situation philosophers and their victim-beneficiaries find themselves in together.

Philosophers have the most undervalued (anti-valued) job in the world: to show that what seems obvious and settled is not nearly as obvious as it appears. In that non-obviousness there is an otherwise. Where there was nothing or necessity there is now choice and freedom.

People tend to misunderstand what philosophy is doing, but blame the mode of expression rather than the material itself, which in fact is the source of the trouble. What philosophy concerns itself with is the way ideas are thought. The ideas as conceived factually are of secondary importance. And the applications of those thoughts in example or practice are yet another degree removed. You could say that philosophy is abstraction of abstractions.

Just as primitive minds have trouble conceiving of science as a method, and instead try to reduce science to a canon of true statements about the physical world (and therefore cannot understand how “intelligent design” could be a considered a reasonable belief but indisputably cannot be considered scientific), people whose understanding limits itself (often on principle) to facts and methods have a hard time imagining philosophy as the next step outward. Science (understood as a disciplined method for observing and relating physical phenomena) is only one mode of intellectuality among many — but intrinsic to its mode of understanding are certain types of reductionism and bracketing of experience in favor of a particular kind of explanation, which creates an artificial sense of completeness (which phenomenologists call a “horizon”).

Think about how scientists speak of beauty. They do not generally speak of it in the terms of the experience of beauty. They’ll talk about what happens to a brain when it experiences beauty. Or they’ll explain why humans might have evolved to experience beauty. Or they will demonstrate how instincts of attraction are useful in the life of an organism, etc. They might describe some of the characteristics of things that are called beautiful. But in the end the kind of being they discuss as related as it is to beauty generally stays within the sphere of what is externally observable, measurable, and mathematically expressible. And that is 100% right and proper… as far as it goes. Where science goes wrong is seeing itself as the last word on knowledge, and its account of reality as being the most fundamental. When science misunderstands itself as containing and underlying all other modes of knowledge, and sees the others as preliminary intuitions, or shorthand versions of its truths (or eventual truths), it falls into a characteristic unwarranted condescending naivete. The most profound scientists tend not to fall into that illusion, since they tend to work at the edges of thought enough to have some self-awareness of the role of creativity in discovery, and therefore more frequently manage to keep their work in its proper philosophical context — but to the degree they do this, they also end up sounding like nutty mystics.

Philosophy pursues the ideal of relating all these different modes of being with as little invalidation (claiming the mode does not need to be accounted for) or reduction (failing to account for the mode of being in terms appropriate to the material) as possible.

Philosophers are in a lose-lose situation. They can write less technically and more simply, but because philosophical ideas of necessity means to write mytho-poetically like Heraclitus of Ephesus, or worse, practi-poetically like Yeshua of Judea. Then they’re either presumptuously misunderstood as nonsensical (that is, the failure to understand is projected onto the thinker and his words are declared meaningless) or presumptuously misunderstood as making a kind of sense they did not actually intend. The philosophers who write technically are accused of obfuscation.

Admittedly, philosophers who write technically are often just bad writers. These “technical” philosophers are also accused of nonsensicality. (I think I remember the Mencken showing his own bare ass by publicly declaring that Emperor Heidegger wears no clothes.) Or they’re semi-understood by 20-year-olds — or at least their vocabulary is adopted and abused — until the general thrust and the lingo starts triggering violent emotional reactions of older, clearer and more irritable thinkers, who’ve already settled on their own ways of seeing things and probably didn’t really want to suffer the consequences of understanding someone else’s alien views. “Because the twenty-something enthusiasts of a thinker are unclear and annoying the thinker himself must also be unclear and annoying, therefore there is no need to bother reading him myself.”

The problem is not in the form. It is in the content. What we really want from philosophers is to be told more about what we already know and are already prepared to understand. We want them to use familiar words with normal definitions, to assert facts about the world that we can add to our existing stock of knowledge quickly, painlessly, effortlessly and nondisruptively. In other words, we want what we call a “philosopher” to conform to what we already think a philosopher should be, not the royal pains-in-the-asses they actually are.