A thinks he knows B’s best use. B thinks he knows his own best use.
Who is more presumptuous? Can we really answer A or B at this point?
One of the two wishes to come to an agreement. One of the two feels entitled to make the call unilaterally.
Now can we answer?
“The tyrants of the spirit. — The march of science is now no longer crossed by the accidental fact that men live for about seventy years, as was for all too long the case. Formerly, a man wanted to reach the far end of knowledge during this period of time and the methods of acquiring knowledge were evaluated in accordance with this universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everything in the world seemed to be accommodated to man, the knowability of things was also accommodated to a human time-span. To solve everything at a stroke, with a single word — that was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the image of the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that in the domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach one’s goal in the manner of Alexander or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. ‘There is a riddle to be solved’: thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philosopher; the first thing to do was to find the riddle and to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form. The boundless ambition and exultation of being the ‘unriddler of the world’ constituted the thinker’s dreams: nothing seemed worth-while if it was not the means of bringing everything to a conclusion for him! Philosophy was thus a kind of supreme struggle to possess the tyrannical rule of the spirit — that some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and mighty man was in reserve — one only! — was doubted by none, and several, most recently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one. — From this it follows that by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrowness of their disciples and that henceforth they must be carried on with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling. ‘What do I matter!’ — stands over the door of the thinker of the future.”
*
It takes courage to stand between the nothingness of pre-birth and the nothingness of death and be humbly finite — always both wrong and right, always both born and destined to die, always both someone and everyone and everything.
The point is not to avoid being wrong. The point is to be as right as we can possibly be. We will always be a wrong to a degree, because that is how knowing is, and that is how we are.
*
Understanding is finite. Every understanding has its own limits.
Every understanding excludes something that some person at some time will recognize as crucial.
We expose the limits of past understanding and understand in a new way whose limits are invisible to us.
We expose old limits and impose new limits.
(To judge judging as bad and to attempt to refrain from further judging is an unjust act of judgment against judgment.)
*
Anaximander via Simplicius:
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
Anaximander via Nietzsche:
Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.
Each time you see the sun, once again, as always, the sun is revealed by particular light.
With each glimpse, particular light, born eight minutes ago, dies in your eye.
*
The sun you see now is the same sun that Adam, Abraham, the pharaohs, the Yellow Emperor, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Christ, Copernicus, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Pol Pot saw.
*
It is interesting to consider that the process you essentially are is powered by the sun.
We — each of us and all of us — are articulations of the sun.
Why this thought? What question does it address?
How is this thought done? What is its procedure?
To what is this thought applied? What is its Jamesian “cash value”?
I knew a dude (in the most precise sense) in high school who spelled out “Angus Van Osbourne” on his chest with band-aids, and then laid out in the sun in order to inverse-tan the words into his skin. (For the uninitiated, this was a concatenation of the names of the reigning trinity of hard rock at that time, and arguably of all time, Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne.)
*
Yesterday, I printed up small sepia-toned pictures of my heroes and hung them up on my wall, under my hand-painted Bulgarian Christ the Teacher icon, and to the right of my print of Raphael’s School of Athens, included for its tiny depiction of Heraclitus. I am not finished yet, but so far I have the young Friedrich Nietzsche (wearing the exact same eye-glasses frames I wear), a middle-aged Jorge Luis Borges, an elderly Martin Buber, an elderly Hans-Georg Gadamer, and an elderly Black Elk. In the near future I plan to add Christopher Alexander, James Dicky and Edwin Muir. I am also considering adding Rene Guenon, Jane Jacobs, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.
I told a good friend of mine about what I was doing and he surprised me by observing: “Wow. That’s sort of adolescent.” He didn’t mean it in a mocking or critical way. That was just how it struck him, and he observed it out loud because we’ve known each other for a long time and we say exactly what we think to each other, almost as a demonstration of faith.
It was surprising how true the statement was, but it was even more surprising to me, knowing what impelled me to hang these little picture, how much it enriched my understanding of “adolescent”. I might as well have band-aided “Hans-Jorge Luis Nietzsche” on my chest. It’s the same thing. It is an attempt to weave oneself into some kind of cultural fabric. It is an attempt to put context around my life within which I understand life. It is a longing for the feeling of home.
It is a step toward what Heidegger calls appropriation of tradition.
*
I’ve annoyed the hell out of people by screwing up the flow of conversation, looking up passages I felt compelled to quote. “Why can’t you paraphrase it?” I can’t paraphrase it because the content is not only the factual content. It is also the warm and beautiful truth that I am bringing in the present a mind I love and allowing that mind to be present in the conversation. It is making continuity between past and future. It makes me feel like a human being to quote one of my heroes. This is why most of my posts are packed with cross-references and links to other people’s thoughts. It is important to me that I have a heritage, and to quote is to make the my heritage immediate in the form of continuation of tradition.
*
A friend of mine told me the story of Pushkin’s last words, how on his deathbed he turned to his books and said “farewell, friends.” If you find this moving, let me know.
Reposting from my professional blog, Synetic Brand…
This passage gets very close to the crux of synetic brand:
When we try to examine the hermeneutical phenomenon through the model of conversation between two persons, the chief thing that these apparently so different situations — understanding a text [NOTE: or a design] and reaching an understanding in a conversation — have in common is that both are concerned with a subject matter that is placed before them. Just as each interlocutor is trying to reach agreement on some subject with his partner, so also the interpreter [ / user] is trying to understand what the text [ / design] is saying. This understanding of the subject matter must take the form of language. It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs — whether in the case of a text or a dialogue with another person who raises an issue with us — is the coming-into-language of the thing itself. Thus we will first consider the structure of dialogue proper, in order to specify the character of that other form of dialogue that is the understanding of texts. Whereas up to now we have framed the constitutive significance of the question for the hermeneutical phenomenon in terms of conversation, we must now demonstrate the linguisticality of dialogue, which is the basis of the question, as an element of hermeneutics.
Our first point is that the language in which something comes to speak is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors. Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. This is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding [synesis] in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.
*
Synetic branding is neither organization-centric, nor is it user-centric.
Synetic branding is relationship-centric, which means all parties, through dialogue, come to a mutually transformative shared understanding.
Synetic branding is the method of generating dialogue between an organization and those who participate in the organization (stakeholders). “To reach [synesis] in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”
Synetic branding sees brand neither as the possession of an organization, nor as the image of the organization in the minds of customers, etc. Neither is exactly wrong, but neither is nearly right enough.
Synetic branding is participatory, which means that brand is a whole that exceeds each of its parts, which both influences and is influenced by its parts. A participant in a synetic brand, whether he participates as an executive, an employee, a shareholder, a partner or a customer, sees by way of the brand’s vision, but to some degree changes the brand’s vision through his participation. The object of this vision is the field with which an organization concerns itself and its offerings within that field, but the vision extends far beyond the object, and influences aesthetic (thus brand identity systems) and how related offerings are perceived (thus brand equity).
Synetic branding means taking responsibility for cultivating mutual understanding among all who participate and recognizing that the essence of a brand is precisely the mutuality of the understanding. Everything, including all the things people commonly mistake for brand itself, such as the image of the company in the minds of whoever), follows from this. Failure to recognize this fact is what has made so many companies into decorated commodity clones. They see everything the same way, manage themselves the same way, follow tweaked and relabeled versions of identical processes, make the same kinds of trade-offs and basically aim for the same ideal as everyone else.
Synetic brand uses large-scale dialogue between an organization’s participants to discover new unifying perspectives on an organization’s offerings that otherwise would remain invisible to everyone.
These perspectives open new questions and new possibilities in the organization’s field of concern. This is the foundation of meaningful innovation and sustainable competitive advantage.
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!”
For someone to wish to really understand what you are saying and to work at pursuing that understanding — this is one of the greatest pleasures of life. It is pleasurable even when the understanding remains incomplete. The desire, and desire’s sole proof — action — is the source of pleasure.
To pursue understanding requires sacrifices of different kinds. First, and most obviously, understanding takes real effort, and the effort required increases with the strangeness of the concepts in question.
This sacrifice of effort leads directly to another more interesting sacrifice, one which is harder to explain: the more a person has understood and overcome strangeness in others, the stranger he himself becomes. So, the better he becomes at understanding other people’s crucial truths, the harder it becomes to understand what he means when he attempts to share his own most crucial truths.
Many people will find many uses for him, but his real use is locked away in his own strange understanding.
*
There are many ways to love a “subject”. One can love a subject as a topic — as something about which someone is factually knowledgeable. Or a person can love a subject as a discipline — as an area one knows practically. To put it in Wittgenstein’s terms “one knows one’s way about” and loves manifesting it in effective action.
Finally, one can love his subject as a subject. The lover of a subject pursues his subject with his own subjectivity. He will shed bulk — even his treasured objective knowledge and his practical know-how — in order to slim down and lighten up enough to penetrate narrow passages and get ever closer to the unattainable point of his pursuit.
(One can love as an academic, a practitioner or a philosopher (philo “love”- sopher “wisdom”).
*
It is unreasonable for someone who has understood too much to expect anyone to undertake understanding what he has understood.
I’ll say this simply, then I’ll say it thoroughly and repellently. (Mark Twain: “I’d write you a shorter letter, but I haven’t the time.”)
Simple version:
I am both like and unlike you in the way that now is both like and unlike an hour from now.
Ugly version:
I think I just understood Heidegger a little deeper, and I wanted to jot down the idea.
Heidegger distinguishes two conceptions of time, “clock time” and lived time (I can’t remember the exact term, and I never scanned the passage). “Clock time” abstracts all moments and makes them equivalent points on a time-line, constituted of an infinite series of moments, each its own “now”. Heidegger saw this abstraction as an alienation from the present and its true relation to past and future, which is one of recollection and anticipation. I read this years ago, so I may have it wrong, but this is how I recall it now, and it is this conception, right or wrong, that I am treating as “Heidegger’s”.
It occurs to me that this same style of abstraction occurs when we abstract a Thou as another I. “We” is taken to be an infinite aggregate of I-subjects.
Our relating of the present moment to some future moment in the future is analogous to my relating my own I to a Thou. The relation preserves an element of likeness, but it also preserves an essential difference. The essential difference is this: the relation is between the I (or the present) — in which it is rooted — and a projection, the Thou (or the future) — toward which the relation extends. But the I and the present is essentially and immediately constituted of relationships, whereas the object of these relationships is not — not immediately, but through the mediation of the present I. But the relationship I presently have with these projected objects is… that they are essentially constituted of relationships just as I (or the present) is.
Now I’ll say it again, this purely for my own satisfaction, but probably with total loss of comprehensibility:
The immediate (I/now/here) mediates, and this act involves mediation and the mediate. (The mediate = mediated entities.)
Mediation is the essential being of the immediate.
Mediation is also the being of the mediate, in one or two ways depending on the nature of the mediated.
The I-it mediation derives a mediated it-object out of its (more properly, “my”) synthetic activity.
The I-Thou mediation may also derive a mediated Thou-subject out of its (“my”) synthetic activity that takes my Thou-subject as one who mediates and whose mediation can be understood.
The I-Thou relationship — to relate to an other as Thou — means the other can be understood.
To understand is to pursue the immediate mediation taken to be the essential being of the Thou, just as immediate mediation is the essential being of I. This is the Golden Rule.
The act of understanding entails pursuit of change of the immediate, of I, right now, here where I am. This requires faith, both in the existence and value of the immediacy of Thou.
*
To understand another person means to pursue experiencing that person’s world, and the medium for this pursuit is faithful dialogue. This occurs between friends, and it is friendship. Which comes first? They happen together. Friendship is mutual pursuit of mutual understanding. The degree of success is less important than the degree of faith.
When I experience frustrations, I console myself by reminding myself that the setbacks are not interfering with the process of solving problems: they are themselves part of the problem I am solving.
This not only dignifies my frustrations, it enriches my problems.
I live for good, rich problems.
*
Insights are conceived in simplicity.
They grow by their own principles, unseen in the darkness of the inner-soul.
Then they fight their way out of you, and you push and push with with great strain and pain.
Then you hold the new idea in your arms and forget everything else.
*
Once I internalized the fact that everything is philosophy — most of all the painful aspects of life — my relationship to the world and philosophy changed and I spontaneously became a practical thinker.
I don’t think with an intention to produce useful ideas, but all my ideas happen to be useful.
Even when I am tasked with solving a problem, I begin by exploring the problem itself to see how many ways its questions can be asked. Somehow, unfailingly, an unintentionally practical solution comes of its own.
*
Nietzsche (of course):
Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!
*
Nature loves to hide itself.
Here it is, all laid out:
Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language — i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. Still, the relationship to the Thou and the meaning of experience implicit in that relation must be capable of teaching us something about hermeneutical experience. For tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou.
It is clear that the experience of the Thou must be special because the Thou is not an object but is in relationship with us. For this reason the elements we have emphasized in the structure of experience will undergo a change. Since here the object of experience is a person, this kind of experience is a moral phenomenon — as is the knowledge acquired through experience, the understanding of the other person. Let us therefore consider the change that occurs in the structure of experience when it is experience of the Thou and when it is hermeneutical experience.
[FIRST STAGE: Thou as a behaving object; understanding as ability to predict behavior and a means to influence/control it. This view is overwhelmingly the norm in business. The problem of the Thou is centered around “eliciting desired behaviors” from customers and employees that benefit the business.]
There is a kind of experience of the Thou that tries to discover typical behavior in one’s fellowmen and can make predictions about others on the basis of experience. We call this a knowledge of human nature. We understand the other person in the same way that we understand any other typical event in our experiential field — i.e., he is predictable. His behavior is as much a means to our end as any other means. From the moral point of view this orientation toward the Thou is purely self-regarding and contradicts the moral definition of man. As we know, in interpreting the categorical imperative Kant said, inter alia, that the other should never be used as a means but always as an end in himself. [NOTE: This is the heart of morality, in my opinion.]
If we relate this form of the I-Thou relation — the kind of understanding of the Thou that constitutes knowledge of human nature — to the hermeneutical problem, the equivalent is naive faith in method and in the objectivity that can be attained through it. [NOTE: There does seem to be an uncanny correlation between fixation on method and an apparent prediction-and-control view of understanding others.] Someone who understands tradition in this way makes it an object — i.e., he confronts it in a free and uninvolved way — and by methodically excluding everything subjective, he discovers what it contains. We saw that he thereby detaches himself from the continuing effect of the tradition in which he himself has his historical reality. It is the method of the social sciences, following the methodological ideas of the eighteenth century and their programatic formulation by Hume, ideas that are a cliched version of scientific method. But this covers only part of the actual procedure of the human sciences, and even that is schematically reduced, since it recognizes only what is typical and regular in behavior. It flattens out the nature of hermeneutical experience in precisely the same way as we have seen in the teleological interpretation of the concept of induction since Aristotle.
[SECOND STAGE: Thou as a separate, “seen against the sky” subjectivity; understanding as psychological explanation. One believes one understands another if he is able to sketch out an accurate and nuanced persona of that person. It has been very, very difficult to extricate myself from this vision of the Thou.]
A second way in which the Thou is experienced and understood is that the Thou is acknowledged as a person, but despite this acknowledgment the understanding of the Thou is still a form of self-relatedness. Such self-regard derives from the dialectical appearance that the dialectic of the I-Thou relation brings with it. This relation is not immediate but reflective. To every claim there is a counterclaim. This is why it is possible for each of the partners in the relationship reflectively to outdo the other. One claims to know the other’s claim from his point of view and even to understand the other better than the other understands himself. In this way the Thou loses the immediacy with which it makes its claim. It is understood, but this means it is co-opted and pre-empted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person. Because it is a mutual relationship, it helps to constitute the reality of the I-Thou relationship itself. The inner historicity of all the relations in the lives of men consists in the fact that there is a constant struggle for mutual recognition. This can have very varied degrees of tension, to the point of the complete domination of one person by the other. But even the most extreme forms of mastery and slavery are a genuine dialectical relationship of the kind that Hegel has elaborated.
The experience of the Thou attained here is more adequate than what we have called the knowledge of human nature, which merely seeks to calculate how the other person will behave. It is an illusion to see another person as a tool that can be absolutely known and used. Even a slave still has a will to power that turns against his master, as Nietzsche rightly said. But the dialectic of reciprocity that governs all I-Thou relationships is inevitably hidden from the consciousness of the individual. The servant who tyrannizes his master by serving him does not believe that he is serving his own aims by doing so. In fact, his own self-consciousness consists precisely in withdrawing from the dialectic of this reciprocity, in reflecting himself out of his relation to the other and so becoming unreachable by him. By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitimacy. In particular, the dialectic of charitable or welfare work operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person’s claim at a distance. We are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work. In these reflective forms the dialectic of the I-Thou relation becomes more clearly defined. [NOTE: This is why I have soured considerably on personality typology. I’ve seen it used to explain away the relevance of other people’s claims: “this claim is only intelligible and applicable to certain temperaments.”]
In the hermeneutical sphere the parallel to this experience of the Thou is what we generally call historical consciousness. Historical consciousness knows about the otherness of the other, about the past in its otherness, just as the understanding of the Thou knows the Thou as a person. In the otherness of the past it seeks not the instantiation of a general law but something historically unique. By claiming to transcend its own conditionedness completely in knowing the other, it is involved in a false dialectical appearance, since it is actually seeking to master the past, as it were. This need not be accompanied by the speculative claim of a philosophy of world history; as an ideal of perfect enlightenment, it sheds light on the process of experience in the historical sciences, as we find, for example, in Dilthey. In my analysis of hermeneutical consciousness I have shown that the dialectical illusion which historical consciousness creates, and which corresponds to the dialectical illusion of experience perfected and replaced by knowledge, is the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment. A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo [“force from behind”]. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light.
[NOTE: This next point is enormously important] It is like the relation between I and Thou. A person who reflects himself out of the mutuality of such a relation changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond. A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition in exactly the same way. In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.
[NOTE: This is why one cannot learn about philosophy (or religion) from survey texts or survey courses. A student immerses himself in the philosophy and tries to see and apply its validity or its meaning is lost. It is not a matter of thoroughness, either. One can know an infinite number of facts about a philosophy or religion or the biographical facts of the people who founded them, without having the slightest essential knowledge of that philosophy or religion. Further, because of one’s erudition on the topic, one may be closed to knowing it any differently.]
[THIRD STAGE: Thou as a partner in a mutual relationship to which I and Thou belong; understanding as synesis, shared vision. Through dialogue, the other is “experienced” and known by way of a change of holistic understanding of the the world, mediated by the content of the dialogue.]
Knowing and recognizing this constitutes the third, and highest, type of hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness. It too has a real analogue in the I’s experience of the Thou. In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou — i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. When two people understand each other, this does not mean that one person “understands” the other. [NOTE: the false intimacy of psychologism.] Similarly, “to hear and obey someone” does not mean simply that we do blindly what the other desires. We call such a person slavish. Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.
This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian’s own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naive mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th “Lyceum Fragment” by Friedrich Schlegel reads: “The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this.” By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it. The hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma. As we can now say more exactly in terms of the concept of experience, this readiness is what distinguishes historically effected consciousness.
*
We cannot regard the other as an object, nor can we regard the other as an alien subject with a separate but explicable experience of the world.
The other is someone who, through dialogue, might showing you something deeply unexpected and world-transfiguring. The other is one with whom the world can be shared in synesis.
Everything I do is guided by and serves one moral principle: a person is to be understood and related to as a Thou. A person is not to be merely or even primarily understood as an object.
To attempt to understand another person objectively is to misunderstand what understanding a person is.
However, to attempt to understand another person without the help of objectivity is also to misunderstand what understanding a person is.
The scientific attitude and the romantic attitude misunderstand what understanding another person is.
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The objectifying scientific attitude and the radically subjective attitude that characterizes romanticism together constitute an antithesis which has been steadily attacked and weakened over the last century and which (I am convinced) is breathing its last putrid breaths. (Nothing wrong with dramatizing things, ok?)
The two attitudes fail to see how an unconscious agreement (a shared determinate ignorance, a cognitive process that is unaware of its own operation) has drawn them into to an intractable conscious disagreement.
It is impossible to find agreement within the terms to which the two sides are unconsciously bound, and they are blind to the possibility of an alternative.
The only possible positions either side can conceive fall on a linear continuum of impure compromises between two pure and antithetical principles. Whatever is not the thesis or its antithesis is understood to be an equivocating ambithesis.
When someone trapped in this kind of ignorance wishes to be principled, he is “uncompromisingly” either-or, wholeheartedly throwing his support behind either the thesis or the antithesis. When he wants to appear politic, circumspect and socially wise it starts talking about “shades of gray”. (After all, you’re either an unrealistic purist or someone who understands the necessity of compromise and occasionally taking it up the tooter.)
At all times, however, all conceptions brainlessly obey the limiting terms of the underlying unconscious agreement, both in the schema of the theory and in practice.
The process of illuminating such forms of shared determinate ignorance, and in the process discovering new possibilities of resolving the issue that fall entirely outside the terms of the old disagreement is called dialectic. One discovers a point of view that opposes the old opposition and unites them in their common limitation, and opens up previously inconceivable options, often also outside the point of contention.
Here is how I’ve been drawing the structure of dialectic. White is the thesis, black is the antithesis and the red is the dialectic overcoming of the dichotomy, which is a new thesis:
Two problems I’ve had with this diagram. 1) Once the old dichotomy fades from relevance a new one forms as a new antithesis forms against the new thesis, and the process repeats. This diagram accurately represents the delusion of the finality of the overcoming (to which some people believe Hegel succumbed), but the whole purpose of dialectic is to overcome this delusion, so the representation must be regarded not as a feature, but a bug. There is no indication that the process will continue, and this indication is essential. 2) Thesis and antithesis are not equal. A fundamentalist and an atheist argue over the existence of a ludicrously misconceived “God”… both are ignorant of other possible conceptions, but it is far more respectable to disagree with a fundamentalist than to be one. The atheist is philosophically superior to the fundamentalist, but both are philosophically inferior to someone who knows other possibilities of knowing God. And of the two, the atheist is closer to that realization than the fundamentalist who mistakes himself for religious and is therefore more closed to lines of questioning that can overcome his ignorance. (AND! — by the way, the limitation of both is that they have failed to grasp the being of Thou, which closes them off not only to the being of God, but also to the being of other people, which brings us back to my original point.) So, the thesis, though not true enough, does at least bear some resemblance to the larger truth, where the antithesis is simply a negative indication: this resemblance is not enough.
For these reasons, from now on, at least until I know better, I am going to draw the structure of the dialectic differently, on the golden section, and also I’m going to draw the antithesis as gold because I like how that looks:
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But what is the determinate ignorance shared by scientism and romanticism? Neither recognizes the role of tradition in selfhood. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this soon.
Meanwhile, here’s something to think about:
The only way to know an Other as Other — as Thou — is to enter into dialogue and consequently come to see the world differently.
Dialogue -> Metanoia -> Synesis -> Tradition -> Community
It’s hard to hear a question when your ears are stuffed with answers.
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Stupidity is rarely honest enough to appear as confusion. More often it takes the form of the aptly-named “no-brainer”.
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“How could anyone possibly disagree with me?” This question, asked rhetorically, is an ignorant confession of ignorance. Asked urgently, it is the dawn of possibility.
When I close my eyes, the blackness I see is not blindness.
When I close my eyes and see blindness, the distinction I have failed to perceive is blindness.
When I close my eyes and see only blackness, recalling that blackness and blindness were once the same to me, I can see blackness against contrasting blindness, sight against contrasting sightlessness, and something against contrasting nothingness.
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It is the essence of blindness that it is not seen. That’s obvious.
What is less obvious is why people who “know” this fact habitually dismiss what doesn’t make immediate sense to them as nonsense, obfuscation, pointless sophistry or deception.
If you can’t discover blindness with the immediacy of sight, how can you become aware of it?
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Knowledge of ignorance is practical knowledge.
Purely theoretical knowledge of ignorance is more ignorance.
The ignorant belief that ignorance is known as a fact (as opposed to a practical stance toward potential coming-to-know) is the root of that peculiarly turbulent intellectual stagnation we call “romanticism”.
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To learn a new fact, all one needs is smarts. To gain an insight one also needs hunger, humility and the capacity to trust. These conditions rarely coincide with power. This is why Nietzsche says “power makes stupid.”
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Invalidation of the testimony of alien perspectives (“the Other”) is the most potent tool we have to stabilize our ignorance. We find many forms of objective justification for never considering the objective claims of the alien other and to keep that other a speaking, behaving object within our own privileged subjectivity. Some of these justifications are cynical, some are credulous, some are rigorously skeptical, some are sloppily sentimental, some are practical, some are fantastic, some are psychological, some are epistemological, some are religious, some are scientific, some are collectivistic, some are individualistic. They come in many forms, but they all stuff our ears with the belief that we already know what we need to know.
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Somehow, one way or another, we manage to make what we don’t want to hear impossible to say.
Too often, when we need to share something of the highest personal significance we are faced with a painful choice: either make it easy to be misunderstood or face the indignation, impatience, frustration or scorn of those who wish always to already know.
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To relate to an other as a Thou-subject and not an It-object means to attempt to share subjectivity, which means to share objectivity.
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If you do not understand what your friend says to you when your friend tells you something, this shows that your understanding of your friend is incomplete.
If you do not understand what your friend says to you when your friend tells you something crucially important, you have no right to believe that you understand your friend.
If you do not understand what your friend is saying to you when your friend tells you something crucially important, and you are unwilling to understand what your friend is telling you, this person is not really your friend. If you believe differently, you do not know what friendship is.
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This is my exegesis on the pop-feminist accusation: “You treat me like an object.” This statement is misleading, though. It isn’t that anyone minds having their objective, bodily being acknowledged, admired or desired. It is that this is not enough. A human relationship requires that the subjective dimension of our being be acknowledged, admired and desired as well. But due to the ambiguity of the word “subject” we can’t very well say “You don’t treat me like a subject.”
If it didn’t sound ridiculous and pompous and if people were prepared to understand what that means, a better way to say this would be: “You do not relate to me as a Thou.” “Thou” includes the entirety of the other’s being — body and spirit.
Most cultures have ways of explicitly honoring the Thou: making the gassho, saying “namaste”, saying “shallom”.
The best way of honoring the Thou is to listen intently and respectfully. Re-spect, “back”-“look” … to regard the other as one who looks back and sees you as part of her world — hopefully a world in which she sees you as a Thou looking back at her. This is the ground for sharing subjectivity and objectivity and also the ground of ethics.
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A blind man knows he is blind because he is told so and shown so.
When I think about the interplay between understanding and application as a hermeneutical-rhetorical circle its appearance and its behavior resembles the Lorenz Attractor.
Or — maybe this is just the plain old hermeneutic circle. Gadamer says of the division of interpretation and application:
Formerly it was considered obvious that the task of hermeneutics was to adapt the text’s meaning to the concrete situation to which the text is speaking. The interpreter of the divine will who can interpret the oracle’s language is the original model for this. But even today it is still the case that an interpreter’s task is not simply to repeat what one of the partners says in the discussion he is translating, but to express what is said in the way that seems most appropriate to him, considering the real situation of the dialogue, which only he knows, since he alone knows both languages being used in the discussion. Similarly, the history of hermeneutics teaches us that besides literary hermeneutics, there is also a theological and a legal hermeneutics, and together they make up the full concept of hermeneutics. As a result of the emergence of historical consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philological hermeneutics and historical studies cut their ties with the other hermeneutical disciplines and established themselves as models of methodology for research in the human sciences. The fact that philological, legal, and theological hermeneutics originally belonged closely together depended on recognizing application as an integral element of all understanding. In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is an essential tension between the fixed text — the law or the gospel — on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by applying it at the concrete moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching. A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect. This implies that the text, whether law or gospel, if it is to be understood properly — i.e., according to the claim it makes — must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application.
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Often, when I’m talking to people about the ideas that concern me, the other person will apologize to me for digressing, then proceed to ask me if what I am talking about could be applied to some concrete situation of concern in their life.
That is not a digression. That is the act of understanding. That is dialogue.
If the entire conversation took place in philosophical language and never left that way of speaking and reasoning, it would not be dialogue (dia– “across” + -logos “word, language, reason”), but homologue (homo- “same” + -logos “word, language, reason”), the sort of conversation that takes place among experts who share specialized language and methods.
Dialogue has far more generative potential than homologue.
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User experience practitioners are constantly telling their clients to overcome organization-centricity. The usual argument is that you need to speak in language your customers can understand and care about. But there are even better reasons than that to know your customers (or more generally, your users or stakeholders): You might learn to see what you’re doing from a different, more productive, more compelling angle.
“We need to find ways to experiment not only with the product innovation itself, but with novel business models. We are now looking for innovations in the interstices between different disciplines – for example, between bio- and nano- technologies. Any new model of innovation must find ways to leverage the disparate knowledge assets of people who see the world quite differently and who use tools and methods foreign to those we’re familiar with. Such people are likely to work both in different disciplines and in different institutions.”
– John Seely Brown, Director Emeritis, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
For similar reasons pursuing understanding of marginal perspectives is valuable. Certainly it is a decent, compassionate thing to do. Sometimes it is prudent. But reckoning with marginal views is also philosophically rewarding. One comes to a deeper and richer understanding of self and world in dialogue with those radically unlike oneself.
I just found a plugin for WordPress that allows threaded discussions. Now, instead of a flat list of comments people can respond directly to other people’s comments.
The captain of a lost ship reasoned thusly:
“If I were at my destination I would no longer be lost. What separates me from my destination is distance. Distance is traversed through the rowing of my oarsman.
“If it is untraversed distance keeping me from my destination and the responsibility for traversing distance belongs to the oarsmen, it is obvious that my oarmen are to blame for our being lost!”
So the captain orderd his navigator and all his officers to report immediately to the galley. He called the oarsmen before them, rebuked them and had them flogged. Then every man, officer and crew alike, grabbed an oar, and together they sat straining in the dark, rowing and rowing and rowing and rowing across the distance.
The density of crucial insights in the passage below is staggering…
Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation — i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation — reflection on effective history — can never be completely achieved; yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical being that we are. To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pregiven, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.
Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth. Since Nietzsche and Husserl, the word has been used in philosophy to characterize the way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one’s range of vision is gradually expanded. A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon, whether it is near or far, great or small. Similarly, working out the hermeneutical situation means acquiring the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.
In the sphere of historical understanding, too, we speak of horizons, especially when referring to the claim of historical consciousness to see the past in its own terms, not in terms of our contemporary criteria and prejudices but within its own historical horizon. The task of historical understanding also involves [NOTE: notice, it involves, but is not exhausted by…] acquiring an appropriate historical horizon, so that what we are trying to understand can be seen in its true dimensions. If we fail to transpose ourselves into the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks, we will misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us. To that extent this seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement: we must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. We may wonder, however, whether this phrase is adequate to describe the understanding that is required of us. The same is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him — i.e., to discover where he is coming from and his horizon. This is not a true conversation — that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject — because the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person. [NOTE: I cannot overstate the importance of this point. Psychologism, all excessive concern for abstract “selves” divorced from concrete practical life, is pseudo-intimacy. Its hidden purpose is in fact to fend off genuine authentic intimacy, which is experienced in change of one’s own world, which is to say deep self-change. Psychologism is an attitude of spiritual self-preservation — not of continuity of life-process, but of static form. It is the mummification or pickling of the soul in self-image.] Examples are oral examinations and certain kinds of conversation between doctor and patient. Historical consciousness is clearly doing something similar when it transposes itself into the situation of the past and thereby claims to have acquired the right historical horizon. In a conversation, when we have discovered the other person’s standpoint and horizon, his ideas become intelligible without our necessarily having to agree with him; so also when someone thinks historically, he comes to understand the meaning of what has been handed down without necessarily agreeing with it or seeing himself in it.
In both cases, the person understanding has, as it were, stopped trying to reach an agreement. He himself cannot be reached. By factoring the other person’s standpoint into what he is claiming to say, we are making our own standpoint safely unattainable. [NOTE: Historical consciousness and psychologism both reduce the I-Thou relationship proper to its subject of inquiry to the terms of I-It, objective, eidetic, “earth yao” terms. This is practical solipsism — imposing one’s own sole I on everything within its purview — whether or not it also formally asserts theoretical solipsism.] In considering the origin of historical thinking, we have seen that in fact it makes this ambiguous transition from means to ends — i.e., it makes an end of what is only a means. The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim to be saying something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint — i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves. Acknowledging the otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth.
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If I read me, then I read into me:
I can’t construe myself objectively.
But he who climbs consuming his own might
bears me with him unto the brighter light.
– Nietzsche, from The Gay Science
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It seems time to repost one of my favorite songs, “The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure”.