All posts by anomalogue

Gadamer – “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”

Hermeneutics, Ideas

I am having problems getting through this chapter of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”. This is one of those chapters where I’ve underlined and starred the margins of 85% of the text. Every paragraph presents a mind-blowing insight, which means I’m immediately compelled to apply that insight to a million problems outside of the book, which means I stop reading. (This is my personal test of a book’s awesomeness: Does the book fling me out of its pages into life?)

It’s always interesting to reread the same physical book, and to see how my own patterns of underling has shifted. This chapter was practically clean from the last reading, which I guess means I didn’t find it all that exciting. It is tangible proof of progress, or at least change.

The following passage may not make a lot of sense outside the context of the book, but I want to post it anyway.

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That subsequent understanding is superior to the original production and hence can be described as superior understanding does not depend so much on the conscious realization that places the interpreter on the same level as the author (as Schleiermacher said) but instead denotes an insuperable difference between the interpreter and the author that is created by historical distance. Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. … . Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well. Perhaps it is not correct to refer to this productive element in understanding as “better understanding.” For this phrase is, as we have shown, a principle of criticism taken from the Enlightenment and revised on the basis of the aesthetics of genius. Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all. [Note: This is why in active listening, the understander must not repeat back or synonymically paraphrase back what one has heard, but must interpret and apply what one has heard and submit this interpretive application to the judgment of the understood, aka validate it.]

Such a conception of understanding breaks right through the circle drawn by romantic hermeneutics. Since we are now concerned not with individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth. That this is what is meant by “understanding” was once self-evident (we need only recall Chladenius). But this dimension of the hermeneutical problem was discredited by historical consciousness and the psychological turn that Schleiermacher gave to hermeneutics, and could only be regained when the aporias of historicism came to light and led finally to the fundamentally new development to which Heidegger, in my view, gave the decisive impetus. For the hermeneutic productivity of temporal distance could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an “existential” and when he interpreted Dasein’s mode of being in terms of time.

Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. Here it is not too much to speak of the genuine productivity of the course of events. Everyone is familiar with the curious impotence of our judgment where temporal distance has not given us sure criteria. Thus the judgment of contemporary works of art is desperately uncertain for the scholarly consciousness. Obviously we approach such creations with unverifiable prejudices, presuppositions that have too great an influence over us for us to know about them; these can give contemporary creations an extra resonance that does not correspond to their true content and significance. Only when all their relations to the present time have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of what is said in them can claim to be authoritative and universal.

In historical studies this experience has led to the idea that objective knowledge can be achieved only if there has been a certain historical distance. It is true that what a thing has to say, its intrinsic content, first appears only after it is divorced from the fleeting circumstances that gave rise to it. The positive conditions of historical understanding include the relative closure of a historical event, which allows us to view it as a whole, and its distance from contemporary opinions concerning its import. [Note: This reminds me of a Rilke quote I’ve posted a million times before, which I will post again below.] The implicit presupposition of historical method, then, is that the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context — in other words, when it is dead enough to have only historical interest. Only then does it seem possible to exclude the subjective involvement of the observer. … It is true that certain hermeneutic requirements are automatically fulfilled when a historical context has come to be of only historical interest. Certain sources of error are automatically excluded. But it is questionable whether this is the end of the hermeneutical problem. Temporal distance obviously means something other than the extinction of our interest in the object. It lets the true meaning of the object emerge fully. But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded, so that all kinds of things are filtered out that obscure the true meaning; but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. The temporal distance that performs the filtering process is not fixed, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension. And along with the negative side of the filtering process brought about by temporal distance there is also the positive side, namely the value it has for understanding. It not only lets local and limited prejudices die away, but allows those that bring about genuine understanding to emerge clearly as such.

Often temporal distance can solve question of critique in hermeneutics, namely how to distinguish the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones, by which we misunderstand. Hence the hermeneutically trained mind will also include historical consciousness. It will make conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that the text, as another’s meaning, can be isolated and valued on its own. Foregrounding a prejudice clearly requires suspending its validity for us. For as long as our mind is influenced by a prejudice, we do not consider it a judgment. How then can we foreground it? It is impossible to make ourselves aware of a prejudice while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, provoked. The encounter with a traditionary text can provide this provocation. For what leads to understanding must be something that has already asserted itself in its own separate validity. Understanding begins, as we have already said above, when something addresses us. This is the first condition of hermeneutics. We now know what this requires, namely the fundamental suspension of our own prejudices. But all suspension of judgments and hence, a fortiori, of prejudices, has the logical structure of a question.

The essence of the question is to open up possibilities and keep them open. If a prejudice becomes questionable in view of what another person or a text says to us, this does not mean that it is simply set aside and the text or the other person accepted as valid in its place. Rather, historical objectivism shows its naivete in accepting this disregarding of ourselves as what actually happens. In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk. Only by being given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth and make it possible for him to have full play himself.

The naivete of so-called historicism consists in the fact that it does not undertake this reflection, and in trusting to the fact that its procedure is methodical, it forgets its own historicity. We must here appeal from a badly understood historical thinking to one that can better perform the task of understanding. Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research, and learn to view the object as the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. [Note: The past is a Thou!] A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as “history of effect.” Understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.

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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

Circles

Hermeneutics, Ideas

Black Elk:

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

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Gadamer:

We recall the hermeneutical rule that we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole. This principle stems from ancient rhetoric, and modern hermeneutics has transferred it to the art of understanding. It is a circular relationship in both cases. The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole.

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Nineteenth-century hermeneutic theory often discussed the circular structure of understanding, but always within the framework of a formal relation between part and whole — or its subjective reflex, the intuitive anticipation of the whole and its subsequent articulation in the parts. According to this theory, the circular movement of understanding runs backward and forward along the text, and ceases when the text is perfectly understood. This view of understanding came to its logical culmination in Schleiermacher’s theory of the divinatory act, by means of which one places oneself entirely within the writer’s mind and from there resolves all that is strange and alien about the text. In contrast to this approach, Heidegger describes the circle in such a way that the understanding of the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of foreunderstanding.

The circle of whole and part is not dissolved in perfect understanding but, on the contrary, is most fully realized. The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding.

The circle, which is fundamental to all understanding, has a further hermeneutic implication which I call the “fore-conception of completeness.” But this, too, is obviously a formal condition of all understanding. It states that only what really constitutes a unity of meaning is intelligible. So when we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only when this assumption proves mistaken — i.e., the text is not intelligible — do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be remedied. The rules of such textual criticism can be left aside, for the important thing to note is that applying them properly depends on understanding the content.

The fore-conception of completeness that guides all our understanding is, then, always determined by the specific content. Not only does the reader assume an immanent unity of meaning, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning that proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said. Just as the recipient of a letter understands the news that it contains and first sees things with the eyes of the person who wrote the letter — i.e., considers what he writes as true, and is not trying to understand the writer’s peculiar opinions as such — so also do we understand traditionary texts on the basis of expectations of meaning drawn from our own prior relation to the subject matter. And just as we believe the news reported by a correspondent because he was present or is better informed, so too are we fundamentally open to the possibility that the writer of a transmitted text is better informed than we are, with our prior opinion. It is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to “understand” the text, psychologically or historically, as another’s opinion. The prejudice of completeness, then, implies not only this formal element — that a text should completely express its meaning — but also that what it says should be the complete truth.

Here again we see that understanding means, primarily, to understand the content of what is said, and only secondarily to isolate and understand another’s meaning as such. Hence the most basic of all hermeneutic preconditions remains one’s own fore-understanding, which comes from being concerned with the same subject. This is what determines what can be realized as unified meaning and thus determines how the foreconception of completeness is applied.

Thus the meaning of “belonging” — i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity — is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices. Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to understand something has a bond to the subject matter that comes into language through the traditionary text and has, or acquires, a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks. On the other hand, hermeneutical consciousness is aware that its bond to this subject matter does not consist in some self-evident, unquestioned unanimity, as is the case with the unbroken stream of tradition. Hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness; but this polarity is not to be regarded psychologically, with Schleiermacher, as the range that covers the mystery of individuality, but truly hermeneutically — i.e., in regard to what has been said: the language in which the text addresses us, the story that it tells us. Here too there is a tension. It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.

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Try this out: What if the formerly-much-jabbered-about (* see note)  “Post-Modern Condition” is essentially the widespread breakdown of any “fore-conception of completeness” possessed at any level by our society. Because of our passive stance toward meaning (that it is to be discovered, not made, as if these two constitute some kind of absolute dichotomy!) since there’s no truth to be discovered, we resign ourselves to utter intellectual and practical fragmentation.

My view: the point of understanding is not to form an adequate picture of the “truth out there.” The purpose of understanding — of synesis, that twofold together — is to, by way of coming to (authentic) agreement on what is “out there” we create meaningful social solidarity: culture.

We seek truth for the sake of truth, in the same way we have sex to have sex. Babies are the side-effect of our intentions and the hidden telos.

Truth is social, and for precisely that reason, we must take truth seriously, which means to be rigorously non-reductive. By that I mean we cannot continue to identify truth with “objectivity”. It’s killing us.

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For your listening enjoyment: “Circles” by the Who and by Camper Van Beethoven.

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* Note: If we’ve stopped talking about postmodern fragmentation and disorientation it’s for the same reason we’ve stopped talking about modernist themes of alienation, nihilism, loss of faith — we no longer have any sense that a non-alienated, non-nihilistic, faithful might be possible, let alone preferable. We’ve never experienced having to contrast with not-having, so not-having is indistinguishable from reality itself.

The hermeneutical-rhetorical circle

Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

As a user experience practitioner, it is interesting to me that the hermeneutical circle (the movement between whole and part that characterizes the process of understanding) originated in ancient rhetoric. The privilege of my profession is that we get to stand on both sides of meaning, as understanders (in the mode of researchers) and as creators of things to be understood (in the mode of designers), and best of all, we get to iteratively connect the two modes. (I’m picturing the infinity symbol: we research understandings, we design things to be understood, we research understandings of our designs, we redesign… etc. )

It seems everything we do in user experience wants to be iterative. (* See note.) I don’t think this is an accident. I think it is because we are in the understanding business, and iterativity is the form of understanding.

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An idea to try on: user experience strategy/design as a species of rhetoric. Pan-sensory, interactive rhetoric. (I’ve been enjoying the perversity of using words revaluated by Gadamer to express benevolent thoughts as villainously as possible. This one falls short of the last example of the pattern, characterizing brand as “prejudice design”. )

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In his wonderful book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis Richard J. Bernstein made a very interesting criticism of Gadamer: that Gadamer did a good job of outlining a theory of hermeneutics, but in regard to practice he left us hanging.

My view is that experience design can be a practical extension of Gadamer’s thought, and in fact is following a semi-conscious trajectory toward this point. It’s always exciting to find new ways to integrate my philosophical mornings and my professional days.

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(* Note: Conversely, much of the friction we experience in the world of business seems to center around the flattening of circularities. Business likes predictability, so it likes nice straight lines. Non-linearity is innately unpredictable.)

Gadamer busting on Romanticism

Ideas

A nice zinger from Gadamer’s Truth and Method:

…the criteria of the modern Enlightenment still determine the self-understanding of historicism. They do so not directly, but through a curious refraction caused by romanticism. This can be seen with particular clarity in the fundamental schema of the philosophy of history that romanticism shares with the Enlightenment and that precisely through the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment became an unshakable premise: the schema of the conquest of mythos by logos. What gives this schema its validity is the presupposition of the progressive retreat of magic in the world. It is supposed to represent progress in the history of the mind, and precisely because romanticism disparages this development, it takes over the schema itself as a self-evident truth. It shares the presupposition of the Enlightenment and only reverses its values, seeking to establish the validity of what is old simply on the fact that it is old: the “gothic” Middle Ages, the Christian European community of states, the permanent structure of society, but also the simplicity of peasant life and closeness to nature.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s faith in perfection, which thinks in terms of complete freedom from “superstition” and the prejudices of the past, we now find that olden times — the world of myth, unreflective life, not yet analyzed away by consciousness, in a “society close to nature,” the world of Christian chivalry — all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority over truth. Reversing the Enlightenment’s presupposition results in the paradoxical tendency toward restoration — i.e., the tendency to reconstruct the old because it is old, the conscious return to the unconscious, culminating in the recognition of the superior wisdom of the primeval age of myth. But the romantic reversal of the Enlightenment’s criteria of value actually perpetuates the abstract contrast between myth and reason. All criticism of the Enlightenment now proceeds via this romantic mirror image of the Enlightenment. Belief in the perfectibility of reason suddenly changes into the perfection of the “mythical” consciousness and finds itself reflected in a paradisiacal primal state before the “fall” of thought.

In fact the presupposition of a mysterious darkness in which there was a mythical collective consciousness that preceded all thought is just as dogmatic and abstract as that of a state of perfect enlightenment or of absolute knowledge. Primeval wisdom is only the counterimage of “primeval stupidity.” All mythical consciousness is still knowledge, and if it knows about divine powers, then it has progressed beyond mere trembling before power (if this is to be regarded as the primeval state), but also beyond a collective life contained in magic rituals (as we find in the early Orient). It knows about itself, and in this knowledge it is no longer simply outside itself.

There is the related point that even the contrast between genuine mythical thinking and pseudomythical poetic thinking is a romantic illusion based on a prejudice of the Enlightenment: namely that the poetic act no longer shares the binding quality of myth because it is a creation of the free imagination. It is the old quarrel between the poets and the philosophers in the modern garb appropriate to the age of belief in science. It is now said, not that poets tell lies, but that they are incapable of saying anything true; they have only an aesthetic effect and, through their imaginative creations, they merely seek to stimulate the imagination and vitality of their hearers or readers.

Another case of romantic refraction is probably to be found in the concept of an “organic society,” [Note: uh oh — this one hits close to the bone] which Ladendorf says was introduced by H. Leo. In Karl Marx it appears as a kind of relic of natural law that limits the validity of his socio-economic theory of the class struggle. Does the idea go back to Rousseau’s description of society before the division of labor and the introduction of property?

I filed this under the Romanticism theme in my wiki.

Thought-structure library

Ideas

I’m contemplating creating a thought-structure library. It could actually take the form of a practical philosophy pattern language.

I can see it dividing into several strata, corresponding to the theoretical (the objective, atomistic, systematizable realm of knowledge, around which most of us draw the line delimiting truth), the practical (the purely intuitive or instinctive sphere of inarticulate know-how, which is rarely as firmly linked to the theoretical as most of us think * , or rather is linked to it very weirdly ** ) and the meaningful (the “subjective”, holistic, gestalt realm of meaningful totalities in which our moral/aesthetic values and our symbol-systems are rooted.

A lot of it will be diagrams, especially in the stratum of the meaningful. It is going to look very cool. (I’m going to have to find my old visual tantrum, the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide”, which I created in response to an epidemic of depicting every triadic relationship as facets of a cube. The cube has semantic value which should not be ignored for the sake of finding a less boring way to depict a generic aggregate-of-three. Use three apples or something to depict that, ok? A cube represents either three dimensions (which also means something specific: co-presence of attributes) or three aspects of something (that is, you can view an identical entity multiple ways). Really, you don’t need an image to depict an aggregate. We all understand aggregates. The difficulty is in depicting anything other than an aggregate. But I digress into the same tantrum that induced the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide” in the first place…

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* Thus the need for field research. If people actually had a clear theoretical understanding of what they do we could just conduct interviews and user research would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Fact is, the gulf between theory and practice, which is so widely recognized in application of theory (expressed in sarcastic remarks to the tune of “that sounds great in theory”) is just as bad running the opposite direction. We rarely reflect on our actions theoretically unless something goes wrong, and theory is asked to assist.

** What we are trying to accomplish has a lot to do with how we schematize our world. Fact is, the theoretical is founded on the practical more than the reverse. And the practical is largely founded on the meaningful. If we saw no value in science, there would be no science. This is a gross simplification, offered in the spirit of provocation.

Negativity

Ideas

Negativity does not mean focusing on what is unpleasant. Negativity means focusing on absence rather than presence.

Many people advise one another to not be negative. This is negativity in regard to negativity: wishing the absence of the negative. Negating negativity does not produce positivity.

But why prefer the positive to the negative? Why try to eliminate negativity? Negativity is not necessarily bad. Negativity has positive value in that it makes room for positivity by signaling problems with what is established.

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That all-too-common prohibition against pointing out problems unless one already has a solution is a nasty trick — a self-preservation strategy for the incumbent version of the truth. To cooperate means there can be no collaborative effort toward diagnosing and confronting problems. It is a sentimentally disguised divide-and-conquer move. The power of dialogue is denied to dissent and granted to preservation.

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Those who know only negative responses to “negative emotions” — confusion, anxiety, disorientation — are hermeneutically crippled. One must learn the positive meaning of the negative. The most important thing for a knower to know is that he does not yet know.

The negative emotions are the sense organs of interpretation.

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Who cares if you have all the answers if you’ve failed to see the questions?Seeing the question is the hard part. Answers are cheap.

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A well-formed question practically answers itself. A question is a perspectival field. Along the lines of the question an answer is sought.

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Many malformed answers result from the failure to ask the question thoroughly enough: one coddles bad ideas that need to be asked into oblivion.

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The term no-brainer is ironically apt.

The world doesn’t get simpler the smarter you are.

Expulsion

Ideas

What happened to him
on the desert plate
of glaring white,
under steep, soft blue,
when heaven sagged,
seeping purple-brown heat;
clouds and ocean
wound around his face,
and the horizon convulsed
and constricted in welts,
and gathered and bound
his groundless feet,
and he slid from the world
unseeing, unseen,
heavy and blind,
a dark, silver drop?

More synetic branding

Brand

The perspective of an organization’s brand reveals that organization, its approach to its business and its offerings as superior. Its greatest importance — brand’s purpose — is to make these revelations of superiority happen.

However, a brand perspective affects more than just the specific objects brand seeks to reveal — it organizes many incidental things around the view, and these things also indicate the perspective.

However, just as where one stands in a room organizes the entire room within a particular perspective, not only the object of one’s attention to (say, a couch one is walking around to inspect it from all angles), the perspective of the brand changes the appearance of the brand’s context. The brand perspective “tilts its context”.

The brand perspective then is given reinforcing coherence by including all possible cues of where one stands when one sees by the brand perspective — that common ground from which one sees when one really understands what the organization stands for. They intuitively indicate where to stand, or better, indicate in a very immediate way that you stand on common ground with the brand in the way stars indicate to navigators where they’ve sailed their ships.

Brand is primarily a perspective one wishes to share. The word for the understanding one gains through seeing by a shared perspective is synesis. Synesis is the Greek word for understanding (literally “together”, both in the sense of “seeing together with…” as well as “seeing as together”) in perspectival unity. The goal of synetic branding is to bring customers to see the world from the point of view of the brand (the brand’s synetic point), by the brand perspective.

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The fundamental elements of a brand model are:

  1. The brand perspective: From where it stands in regard to its purpose, how does the organization see what it is and does?
  2. The brand position: From where it stands in the competitive landscape, relative to itself how does the organization see its competition? (This is relative positioning: there is no single competitive landscape, only the landscape viewed from competing synetic points.)
  3. The brand attributes: From where it stands in the world, what looks right? What outward appearances conform to the ideal when one stands here?

A nonclarifying clarification of Birth of Tragedy

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Despite all appearances, the star of the Birth of Tragedy is Hermes. Hermes is implicated in the union of Dionysus and Apollo in tragedy, and is the primary object of the study. Further, Hermes is the subject of the study, the author.

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Imagine a herm with the face of Dionysus on one side and the face of Apollo on the other.

Such fusions are made possible by and manifest Hermes. Without Hermes, the realities of the world would be as numerous, as various and and irreconcilable as the myriad eyes of the giant, Argos.

A face is made possible by and manifests Apollo. Without Apollo, there could be no objects of intention: consciousness would dangle in a state of “conscious of…?” Even on the other side,  the question of “who is conscious?” is detached and unresolvable.

Hermes is the ethical face of Dionysus: the “outwarding” of what is purely “inward” (to use a common but misleading dichotomy), the inward being what would remain if one could subtract the sum from the whole of this reality we share and call the world.

Synetic branding

Brand, Design, Philosophy

A good brand experience makes an organization’s perspective manifest to its stakeholders.

Some stakeholders are outsiders who have an outsider’s relationship to the organization. (e.g. current or prospective customers, the press, the interested public.) Other stakeholders constitute the organization itself. (e.g. employers, employees, partners, shareholders.)

The manifestation of the perspective takes the form of a sharing of understanding. Some of this understanding is explicit. Certain facts are agreed upon. The most important aspects of the understanding, however, are implicit: what is the significance of the facts at hand? What is the relative importance of each fact? How do the facts connect? What aspects of an offering are essential, and what aspects are less important or negligible?

Every act of design is one of balances and trade-offs. The best designs make its trade-offs feel obvious and necessary, to the point of invisibility. What is marginalized or omitted is what was irrelevant. (A classic example of this kind of trade-off is the London Underground “Tube map”.)

So, within the brand perspective is embedded the company’s standards and rankings of value. Those things seen as most important are given the most attention and emphasis. The less important things are ignored or downplayed, sometimes pointedly. The standards and values determine how an organization behaves, how it presents itself and how it develops and delivers its offerings.

(The classic example: What makes a computer more or less desirable? Low price and high performance? Those who see it that way are unlikely to purchase a Macintosh. However, if you view computers the way Apple does and put a premium on how it feels to use and own a computer, you are likely to consider only a Macintosh when purchasing a new computer. Another example: What do you consider important the most important quality in a car? Style? Performance? If so, you probably won’t buy a Toyota. However, if you see reliability as the single most important quality in a car, it is very likely you will consider Toyota. Boring, but compelling. Consequently, there are many Toyota owners, and very few Toyota enthusiasts. Toyota makes cars for people who don’t love cars.)

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If an organization wishes to have an authentic, compelling brand its leadership must 1) actually have a perspective on what it does that is different from its competition, 2) the perspective must be one that can be shared, 3) the leadership must know how to share its perspective, 4) the perspective must be practically consequential (the perspective changes the way one acts), and 5) the organization’s leadership must have the courage to believe its own eyes and to actually live and lead according to how it sees. It cannot constantly second-guess itself, equivocate, compromise or waffle between its perspective and the myriad other ways of seeing.

This does not mean one denies the existence or validity of other ways of seeing. It does not mean that one does not believe in the possibility that other ways of seeing might turn out to be better. (If you have a taste for such things, allow your mind to boggle for a moment at what it means to see a new definition of better as better than the one you currently hold! Better… how?)

It does, however mean one sees for himself. It means that one listens to others in order to see with them what they are seeing, and to share with them what one is seeing. This listening and sharing — dialogue in the proper sense — presupposes an expectation of seeing for oneself and the insight that one could at any moment see differently, and that difference could be deeply and extensively consequential.

Most of all it means that a leader who wished to lead an organization with a real brand must see by a genuine brand vision.

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Leaders who lack vision rarely know it. They believe an ability paint a vivid, desirable and detailed picture of the future and to lay out a plan for actualizing that picture is having vision. The mistake is understandable — some imagination and ability to visualize and describe is involved. It is a valuable skill for a leader to possess. However, this is not vision.

Vision is seeing what their organization is and does in a distinctive, persuasive and consequential way. This way of seeing makes their organization look, feel and behave differently from its peers.

It is a subtle difference, but a substantial and consequential one. The ability to share one’s ambitions and plans persuasively might help an organization perform better, but it won’t help it accomplish anything new. If this were all vision were, nobody would care much about vision. It would just be another skill.

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There are multiple levels of branding needed in user experience projects:

  1. The company has an articulated brand, its offerings are deliberately on-brand. What is required is framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  2. The company lacks an articulated brand, but has developed its offerings through a tacit brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement)  and b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  3. The company lacks an articulated brand, and has developed its offerings through a tacit and unclear or inconsistent brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement), b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience, c) a establishing a program to communicate the brand articulation throughout the organization and, d) and additionally, developing parallel programs to operationalize the brand – that is, to redesign the organizations processes to produce on-brand offerings and uniformly on-brand customer experiences at every touchpoint.
  4. The company lacks brand altogether, and has developed its offerings strictly through imitation of best practices or inconsistently according to fragmentary individual or factional whim. What is required is a) anthropological study of the organizational culture and the stakeholders it serves  to understand the possibilities, given the organization’s traditions, constitution and contexts. From this foundation a brand strategy consisting of a brand articulation and supporting operational changes can be developed to transform the organization into a coherent culture.

Brand is the outward expression of an authentic, coherent culture. This is why, despite the fact that all companies have logos and most have corporate graphic standards, very few have actual brands.

Most brands are like most people. They try to play a part without really being it. It is hollow and unpersuasive.

Quantity and quality

Philosophy

I want to get clearer on the relationship between quality and quantity. My view is this: every quantification is an indicator of a quality, and it is solely from this that the quantification derives its significance. Further, our concern for the quantitative is rooted in and derived from qualitative concerns.

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The quantitative seems more real than the qualitative because on principle it is follows explicit rules of thought. It is easy both to see for oneself and to demonstrate to others correctness or incorrectness of such thinking, and therefore it is easy to establish synesis (shared understanding), around the correctness of the calculations. (The same is true for logic.) Agreement on qualities (and measuring them) on the other hand is much harder to establish.

As a means to establish agreement, the quantifiable and the logical are indispensible tools, and absolutely should not be seen as opposed to the quantitative.

However, these tools are a means to qualitative ends.

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Failure to examine the linkage between the quantitative to the qualitative is where we go wrong (in business, in education, in politics, etc.).

The urgency of finding agreement and stabilizing reality in some kind of expedient synesis causes us to gloss the hard questions in order to have easy answers.

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In the shell game of modernity, experts shuffle quantities before us until we forget what qualities are hidden beneath. Eventually, we forget  about the qualities contained in the quantities. Eventually, dazed by the blur of Whats and Hows and Whos we forget Why.

Medusa’s comb

Philosophy

Akrasia – ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek, from a- ‘without’ + kratos ‘power, strength.’ The term is used esp. with reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Incontinent – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin incontinent-, from in– ‘not’ + continent– ‘holding together.’

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Akrasia — often translated as “moral incontinence” — is the incapacity to maintain continuity in one’s being. The discontinuity can be experienced in the moment in the form of indecision, disorientation or confusion, but it can also be experienced as a moments of great clarity, but a clarity that contradicts the preceding moments of clarity and sees no reason to reconcile moments.

The latter form of akrasia appears to the one experiencing it to be an irruption of insight. One sees the light, is saved, reborn. The old self’s perspective is invalidated and replaced with the new. The new wisdom attacks the old perspective’s claim to wisdom and sees no reason for reconciliation.

Akrasia can be seen as sporadic hubris, or hubris can be seen as low-frequency akrasia.

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The serpent is a traditional symbol of wisdom.

Medusa’s head was a ball of wild, biting serpents.

Nothing in excess

Philosophy

The why by which one approaches life determines one’s how, which in turn articulates the what.

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Qualities articulate categories. Categories provide the abstraction necessary to quantify. This is the principle of individuation.

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Some mythical hearsay:

In the Greek pantheon, Apollo was (among other things) the god of surfaces and of individuation.

Myth tells us that Apollo fell in love with the Nymph Daphne. Daphne did not return his love. He chased her and tried to rape her. Daphne prayed to Mother Earth for help. She was transformed into the laurel tree.

This is when Apollo adopted his philosophy of moderation. The laurel was made sacred to his followers, and among the inscriptions on his temple in Delphi appear two sayings:

Know Thyself.

Nothing in Excess.

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There are no two of anything, not strictly speaking. Only instances of a category can be counted.

Some categories are unavoidably perceived. Some are far more artificial than we realize. If society as a whole stopped seeing them, they’d no longer have reality.

But make no mistake, categories originate in us.

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The notion that the quantifiable is more real than that which resists quantification — even in areas where qualities are vastly more important than quantities — is a why firmly reinforced by prodedural hows resulting in a pretty hideous what.

This does not mean we don’t attempt to quantify wherever we can. It means that we start from the fullness of reality and humbly quantify as much of it as we can and respect the remaining unquantifiable reality as both real and as the wellspring of value.

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The protest “but how do we measure that?” … that “but” signifies illegitimacy of the yet-unmeasurable and the ultimately unmeasurable.

Measure it and then it can be considered part of reality. Until then it is imaginary, arbitrary, merely subjective.

Can we measure this claim that only the measurable can be considered valid? If not, can we consider this standard valid?

Gadamer on adventures and episodes

Philosophy

I read this passage in Gadamer’s Truth and Method during my family’s adventure in New York:

The representation of the whole in the momentary Erlebnis obviously goes far beyond the fact of its being determined by its object. Every experience is, in Schleiermacher’s words, “an element of infinite life.” Georg Simmel, who was largely responsible for the word Erlebnis becoming so fashionable, considers the important thing about the concept of experience as this: “the objective not only becomes an image and idea, as in knowing, but an element in the life process itself.” He even says that every experience has something of an adventure about it. But what is an adventure? An adventure is by no means just an episode. Episodes are a succession of details which have no inner coherence and for that very reason have no permanent significance. An adventure, however, interrupts the customary course of events, but is positively and significantly related to the context which it interrupts. Thus an adventure lets life be felt as a whole, in its breadth and in its strength. Here lies the fascination of an adventure. It removes the conditions and obligations of everyday life. It ventures out into the uncertain.

But at the same time it knows that, as an adventure, it is exceptional and thus remains related to the return of the everyday, into which the adventure cannot be taken. Thus the adventure is “undergone,” like a test or trial from which one emerges enriched and more mature.

There is an element of this, in fact, in every Erlebnis. Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and at the same time related to the whole of one’s life. It is not simply that an experience remains vital only as long as it has not been fully integrated into the context of one’s life consciousness, but the very way it is “preserved and dissolved” (aufgehoben) by being worked into the whole of life consciousness goes far beyond any “significance” it might be thought to have. Because it is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too.

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Popular fiction is episode. Literature is adventure.

Fact is episode. Insight is adventure.

Most vacations are episodes, and that’s why I’ve always despised them.

No place to lay your head

Philosophy

Foxes have the holes, birds have their nests, and workers have their work stations. Everything established, everything with an accepted precedent, has its place in the world.

If, however, you are a new product-producer participant in humankind’s perpetual self-reinvention of humankind you will have no place until you make yourself a place.

Our choice is not either-or. We are not forced to either deny ourselves or to deny the world.

Humility

Philosophy

People demand humility but are deeply offended if their demands are indulged.

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The offense at what strikes one as superior to oneself is very different from the offense at that which presumes to be superior but is sealed against learning otherwise. The former always attributes its offense to the latter. The latter always attributes the offense it arouses to the former.

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We all believe in better or worse, even when we pretend to know better.

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Arrogant – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare.

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Possession is consummated socially. Until possession is publicly acknowledged there’s only a claim.

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Good practical advice from Nietzsche:

Artist’s ambition. — The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

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You can acknowledge the importance of social opinion by submitting to it.

You can also betray its importance by denying its significance with suspiciously excessive vehemence.
Finally, you can acknowledge the importance of social opinion by working to influence it, superficially at the factual level, or deeply at the level of vision.

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We have the capacity to see everything differently, and that’s very weird.

Aesthetic differentiation

Brand, Hermeneutics

Gadamer on the Romantic/modern conception of aesthetics:

The shift in the ontological definition of the aesthetic toward the concept of aesthetic appearance has its theoretical basis in the fact that the domination of the scientific model of epistemology leads to discrediting all the possibilities of knowing that lie outside this new methodology [“fiction”!].

Let us recall that in the well-known quotation from which we started, Helmholtz knew no better way to characterize the quality that distinguishes work in the human sciences from that in the natural sciences than by describing it as “artistic.” Corresponding positively to this theoretical relationship is what we may call “aesthetic consciousness.” It is given with the “standpoint of art,” which Schiller first founded. For just as the art of “beautiful appearance” is opposed to reality, so aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality — it is a form of the “alienated spirit,” which is how Hegel understood culture (Bildung). The ability to adopt an aesthetic stance is part of cultured (gebildete) consciousness. For in aesthetic consciousness we find the features that distinguish cultured consciousness: rising to the universal, distancing from the particularity of immediate acceptance or rejection, respecting what does not correspond to one’s own expectation or preference.

We have discussed above the meaning of the concept of taste in this context. However, the unity of an ideal of taste that distinguishes a society and bonds its members together differs from that which constitutes the figure of aesthetic culture. Taste still obeys a criterion of content. What is considered valid in a society, its ruling taste, receives its stamp from the commonalities of social life. Such a society chooses and knows what belongs to it and what does not. Even its artistic interests are not arbitrary or in principle universal, but what artists create and what the society values belong together in the unity of a style of life and an ideal of taste.

In contrast, the idea of aesthetic cultivation — as we derived it from Schiller — consists precisely in precluding any criterion of content and in dissociating the work of art from its world. One expression of this dissociation is that the domain to which the aesthetically cultivated consciousness lays claim is expanded to become universal. Everything to which it ascribes “quality” belongs to it. It no longer chooses, because it is itself nothing, nor does it seek to be anything, on which choice could be based. Through reflection, aesthetic consciousness has passed beyond any determining and determinate taste, and itself represents a total lack of determinacy. It no longer admits that the work of art and its world belong to each other, but on the contrary, aesthetic consciousness is the experiencing (erlebende) center from which everything considered art is measured.

What we call a work of art and experience (erleben) aesthetically depends on a process of abstraction. By disregarding everything in which a work is rooted (its original context of life, and the religious or secular function that gave it significance), it becomes visible as the “pure work of art.” In performing this abstraction, aesthetic consciousness performs a task that is positive in itself. It shows what a pure work of art is, and allows it to exist in its own right. I call this “aesthetic differentiation.”

Whereas a definite taste differentiates — i.e., selects and rejects — on the basis of some content, aesthetic differentiation is an abstraction that selects only on the basis of aesthetic quality as such. It is performed in the self-consciousness of “aesthetic experiences.” Aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) is directed towards what is supposed to be the work proper — what it ignores are the extra-aesthetic elements that cling to it, such as purpose, function, the significance of its content. These elements may be significant enough inasmuch as they situate the work in its world and thus determine the whole meaningfulness that it originally possessed. But as art the work must be distinguished from all that. It practically defines aesthetic consciousness to say that it differentiates what is aesthetically intended from everything that is outside the aesthetic sphere. It abstracts from all the conditions of a work’s accessibility. Thus this is a specifically aesthetic kind of differentiation. It distinguishes the aesthetic quality of a work from all the elements of content that induce us to take up a moral or religious stance towards it, and presents it solely by itself in its aesthetic being.

Provable / significant

Philosophy

From time to time. — He sat himself at the city gate and said to one who passed through it that this was the city gate. The latter responded that this was true, but that one should not want to be too much in the right if one wanted to be thanked for it. “Oh,” the former replied, “I desire no thanks; but from time to time it is nonetheless very pleasant not only to be in the right but to be acknowledged to be right as well.”

– Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims 297

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A (the?) essential tension: What is most provable matters least. What matters most is the least provable.

Grammatical x-ray (exposed on Chinese film): Thesis [passive] : antithesis [active]. Thesis [active] : antithesis [passive].

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“No, what is most provable is the most important.” Prove it.

Parenting a company

Brand

Raising a child is not an act of building or assembly, but of cultivation. The child develops out of the generative forces given to him as his nature at birth. Some new qualities can be implanted, but these new qualities grow out of his nature. To think of the qualities as annexations is a deep mischaracterization of character-building which makes success a matter of pure luck. The parents literally does not know what they are doing.

Parents cannot make their children into whatever they’d like. A child begins life with a nature — a  temperament, talents, strengths and weaknesses. This nature can be cultivated into an adult personality that does full justice to the child’s nature, aligns all his natural forces, and provides the child with authentic self-awareness — or the nature can be selectively ignored, wasted, suppressed or perverted to suit the parent’s prejudices and aims, with results that range from mediocrity to dysfunction.

The same can be said for a company. A company can be cultivated through good management and groomed to convey a brand to the outside world and to itself. Or leaders can fantasize out and decree a “brand” for the company that suits their own taste or the whatever they think their customers will like. The brand might “take”, but if the organizational culture — however embryonic it is — is ignored, the brand might flounder or even undermine the company’s development. Or worse, deprived of the inspiring resistance of nature, the leadership might concoct the normal hackneyed list of desirable traits (you know, integrity, openness, innovation, customer-centricity, blah, blah, blah) and create another generic corporate non-entity.

People who start from the outside and try to bring themselves into conformity to the world’s expectations tend to be somewhat bland, ineffectual and dully conflicted. The same is true for companys.