In goal-directed activity, a goal is to be accomplished by whatever means are necessary. The goal is primary and the activity is secondary and variable. And if the goal is met, activity is no longer valuable.

In intrinsically valuable activity, such as play, there may be multiple possible outcomes, and there may be no goal at all. The activity is primary, and the goal is secondary, variable, and possibly even non-existent.

In consummational activity, means and ends are bound together so that the end and means are inseparable. The value of the means consists in its being the pursuit of the consummating end, and the value of the end consists in its being the consummation of the means.

With consummational activities, questions of the primacy of means versus ends, often posed as theoretical — “What if we have to chose one?” — are attempts to reduce the consummational relationship to the terms of means versus ends. The proper answer is “It is both, or neither.” This answer is factually true, and it is also practically and morally true.

Practical truth: once one assigns primacy to means or to ends one begins to think in terms of satisfying one at the expense of the other within the current way of seeing the problem rather than looking for new perspective on the problem where both can be satisfied as a whole.

Moral truth: the consummational relationship is what separates moral action from the merely functional. In morality, ends do not justify means, but just as much means do not justify ends. To pursue an end one considers morally “good” by immoral does not justify the means. It desecrates the end. But also, to act according to moral precepts even when the action clearly leads to disaster — this is usually presented as showing courage, integrity and faith — but in fact, it only shows intellectual and ethical sloth — a preference for exertion of body over recognizing the finitude of the human mind, even in its ability to codify principles or interpret scripture. To believe one possesses godlike knowledge of the moral absolute is arrogant, and to apply that knowledge as if it were a technique is a cowardly avoidance of dread in the face of the infinite.

To achieve moral ends by moral means in the infinite flux of concrete situation requires constant, dreadful, excruciating effort to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our world. It is this tension that straightens the potentially closed circularity of human-animal existence into a forward-thrusting outspiral toward human-divinity.

I think destiny may just be a way to express the state of being in which a person discovers optimal harmony of all his multifarious drives and talents in goal-oriented action.

Ordinary fate offers a little bit to this aspect of the self, a little to that, while suppressing or crippling other aspects. Destiny is a moment within fate where the entirety of self recognizes in an image of accomplishment its fullest, unified potential.

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The goal is taken as destiny, but this goal is not to be reached by whatever means are most expedient. The goal provides the focusing image of the pursuit. The pursuit itself is the root of the value, but the pursuit is consummated by the goal, and the two are inseparable.

This is another example of the consummation relationship, and it is entirely different from goal-directed activity (“the ends justify the means”) and intrinsically pleasurable activity (“the journey is the destination”).

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A boy who falls in love with a girl is called to give her a glimpse of his characteristic reaction to destiny.

Principle — ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, from Latin principium ‘source,’ principia (plural) ‘foundations,’ from princeps, princip– ‘first, chief.’

A principle comes first, or it is not a principle.

A principle might be an articulation of what is already coming first, a naming of an instinctive motive. Or it can be imposed and made to precede action, in the form of a law. (These two should be kept distinct. If one behaved instinctively, one should remember it and not pretend one was following a code.) The best principles are between instinctive motive and law — the cultivation of an instinct or a constellation of instincts into a disciplined force.

Too often however, principles are added last as justifications for unjustified behavior. It is usually easy to find some principle or another to self-interpret actions as moral. The unprincipled nature of such actions and interpretations come out only in examining and comparing how one applies principles in judging one’s own and other’s actions. Is the application of the principle consistent from moment to moment and person to person? Is the memory constant, or does the story change?

We keep working to provide more and more, cheaper and cheaper, better and better products to consumers.

Nobody in our era has more attention lavished upon him than the consumer.

Why? Because satisfying customers is what brings us success, and success brings us great rewards — bigger homes, cooler cars, higher-fi home theaters — all eventually culminating in a comfortable retirement.

We work hard and make sacrifices to improve the lives of consumers so we can have better lives as consumers.

So, we, ourselves, are split between roles of slave and master: as producers we sacrifice everything; as consumers we bask in autocratic pleasure  — we expect everything, and we are always right.

But does this way of living make sense? Is it possible that we are sacrificing the better half of life?

To repeat a cliche: does consumption bring any lasting happiness at all? What if the cornerstone of lasting happiness is not having, but doing? Are we selling our only hope of fullness (of doing) for empty promises of happiness in having?

Or worse, do we actually think these sacrifices to who-knows-what make us “good people”?

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This is not a merely theoretical question: If we see consumption as the point of production, we will naturally live a very different work ethic than someone who sees production as the point of production.

And even among those who see production as intrinsically valuable, the attitude one takes toward the consumer’s role in production will also determine one’s work ethic.

It is here — in the attitude toward the other — that people get tangled up in their thinking. Things seem to come down to terms of selfishness vs selflessness. It seems that ethically one’s self is mainly something to either indulge or overcome. The give-and-take of coming to agreements is finding the selfish-selfless balance so nobody takes more than their share of the goodness. We compromise by averaging our interests. Or we claim the higher good for our self by sacrificing our own lower interests in order to be altruistic. But what is gained, really?

I find this way of looking at things depressing. I think the example of really great gifts shows an alternative.

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When we give an inspired gift — the kind that brings enormous pleasure to giver and receiver — the gift-giver and the gift-receiver participate together in a gift-exchange relationship. Both parties must participate in the right spirit or the gift is spoiled.

The giver must care about the receiver and act, not selflessly, but otherfully and togetherfully. The giver is attuned to the receiver’s being (in the form of the kinds of things the receiver loves in the world) but also to the relationship that binds the giver and receiver together. When the gift is loved for its especial, specific perfection — perfect in a way that shows that the giver really knows and acknowledges the receiver — the relationship is consummated in the gift.

As always, the cliche is true: It is the thought that counts. But the thought in question is not the mere intention to please (though that is very important). The best gift shows that the giver values and has thought about the receiver, about the relationship they share, about what can express that relationship in concrete form, consummate it, make it more concrete, more social, more visible to the world.

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Let’s compare the otherful-togetherful gift with the selfish gift and the selfless gift.

A selfish gift is one that gives the receiver a sense that they as an individual did not really factor much into the gift. The selfish giver might give something he himself wants and indulged his own desire to buy it, using the occasion of the gift as an excuse. Or he might buy something he thinks the other should want to have, disregarding the question of whether the receiver actually does want it. Or he might buy the gift as a form of self-expression, showing his wealth or great taste or ingenuity, etc., but not thinking at all about the intrinsic value of the gift to the receiver.

The common quality is that the giver does not consider the experience of the receiver, only his own experience. The giver does not share the receiver’s pleasure (though he might take pleasure in his own success). The receiver is not fully present to the giver in the act of giving.

A selfless gift is one that is intended to give the receiver pleasure, but in a distant, non-involved way. The receiver is viewed as an individual independent of relationship, and so the gift does not affirm the relationship between the giver and receiver. The gift is simply the transfer of desired property from one party to another. The selfless giver will sometimes ask what the other wants and give him exactly what he wants. Or the selfless giver will buy his way out of the obligation to give a gift by simply transferring money to the receiver. Or the selfless giver will give the appropriate gift for the occasion.

The common quality is that the giver does not consider his own experience giving , only that of the receiver. As with the selfish gift, the giver does not share the receiver’s pleasure, but in this case, it is because he does not take pleasure in the giving. The giver is not fully present to the himself in the act of giving.

With the selfish gift, the gift could have been given to anyone.

With the selfless gift, the gift could have been given by anyone.

An otherful-togetherful gift could only have been given by this gift-giver to this gift-receiver.

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Few gifts are purely selfish or selfless or otherful-togetherful, but the point here is not to create classifications. It is to point to an ideal.

The ideal of otherful-togetherful is completely outside the discourse of individualism vs collectivism, of selfishness vs altruism, and of company-centricity vs customer-centricity (or user-centricity).

The otherful-togetherful gift transcends both self-centricity and altruism and points to a paradigm of relationship-centricity.

This paradigm is the form of successful friendships, marriages, businesses, and communities. It is lack of awareness of this paradigm that has allowed so many precious cultural assets to decay into burdensome, pleasureless irrelevance.

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When businesses learn to stop thinking their choice is either 1) selfishly foisting products they think are great on customers they barely know, or 2) selflessly losing themselves in conforming to the customer’s wishes (which takes the form of coercing employees to sacrifice their own health and happiness in the quest to satisfy the customer), and learn instead to be relationship-centric it will be far more possible for people to create, give and receive happiness in producing and consuming.

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There’s also a selfish and selfless mode of receiving gifts, and that is also relevant to how business is done.

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I’m beginning to see brand as the symbolic tokens of a gift-giving relationship.

We need to stop acting as if we make a decision to get married. Fact is, marriage is a collaborative change in being of two people. That change is subjective, but it is a subjective fact. There is no luxury of arbitrary invention in marriage. A marriage is discovered to have begun, and once begun it can be cultivated, or left alone, or starved, or killed.

The same is true for anything spiritual in nature, including the creation of art, the education of a child and the establishment of a brand. These entities, and the processes by which they become, are subjective facts — true or false to some real degree.

There are plenty of formal arrangements of people erroneously called “marriages”, formal arrangements of aesthetic elements erroneously called “art”, facts and skills acquired and correctly recited and performed erroneously called “education”, and formal arrangements of symbols erroneously called “brands” — and to the objective eye, they are indistinguishable. The protest “but what are the formal, measurable criteria by which we can judge the authenticity?” begs the question. Subjective truths exist, despite the fact that they cannot be judged by formal, measurable criteria.

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So, faced with the painful “squishiness” of subjective truth, how do we satisfy the demands of objectivity? We institutionalize these things, act as though they are essentially institutional and lose the question of their subjective existence altogether. The institutional certification is the truth.

When this happens the subjective truths are lost. The solidity and outer appearance is gained at the loss of the inside essence. The outside “fact” gains honor and attention while its inner content suffocates in the dark and decays away.

Whether these objectively certified truths persist or perish, they do not live or function or bring any real good into the world. Nobody can really care about them, at least not intrinsically. But caring is yet another subjective fact.

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A women who loses herself to her husband doesn’t have a husband and is not a wife. A man who ruins himself satisfying his wife’s demands doesn’t have a wife and is not a husband. There is no actual marriage to end or annul. What was called “marriage” was in fact only an institutionally certified arrangement of two separate individuals. It may be possible for the couple to recognize the error and become married. Or it might be necessary to declare the mistake irredeemable.

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How is a subjective fact measured? It can’t be observed directly and it cannot be measured. It can only be detected indirectly through how it manifests in behavior.

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We’ve got to get serious about understanding subjective truth, or our culture will lose its subjective core and stop experiencing it as intrinsically valuable. Our culture itself will become a big empty certified institution, even if it outwardly looks the same.

The inner difference will manifest in behavior: we will stop working to preserve it for future generations.

Thoughts are clothed intuitions.

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An intuition seems more miraculous than a thought for the same reason that a 1-day-old baby seems more miraculous than an 80-year-old man. But in both cases there have been significantly more of the former than the latter.

Another way to talk about the triad is to express it as kinds of problems — or dimensions of a problematic situation:

• A moral problem involves values: Why does this situation matter?
• A practical problem involves behavior: What actions are possible in this situation and what are the consequences?
• A theoretical involves cognition: What is this situation on the whole and in part? What is essential to this situation, what are its constituent elements, how do the elements relate to one another and to the whole of the situation?

These problem dimensions are deeply interrelated. A change in any one of dimension changes the others.

The moral modifies the practical: If something has no moral significance, we lack all motivation to respond to it, or even to examine it. We only think about and act upon situations with some direct or indirect moral significance. When something has moral significance we are intrinsically compelled to respond to it.

The moral modifies the theoretical: Whatever it is that makes a situation matter to us is also what makes us regard some facts and features of the situation intensely significant and others negligible. (Consider “media bias.”)

The practical modifies the moral: Our practical responses to a situation change the situation, and reveal new aspects of it. Just as importantly, our practical response to a situation can also change us, or it can reveal new aspects of ourselves to ourselves. Whether the change is actual or perceptual, and whether concerns us or the situation as a whole, doesn’t matter: the moral situation is now a different one. A situation might escalate or resolve, or we may gain new insights into the situation. We might become worn down to the point of unconsciousness, or become hyper-alert. We might become so caught up in a situation that “we are no longer ourselves” or we might orient ourselves to the situation and figure out how to be more authentically ourselves in it. Or we might have new insights into our own moral responsibility which change how we relate to the situation. In all these cases the moral situation has essentially changed. (Think about what happens to soldiers over the course of a war.)

The practical modifies the theoretical: Besides the obvious fact that practical action is the primary way we learn (we make discoveries), our practical aims determine what we see and how we see. We concentrate on different things in our environment, and different characteristics of things stand out, depending on what we are trying to accomplish. We see through a functional lens. (When we are baking a cake, the fact that a bag of flour can serve as a doorstop doesn’t occur to us, but when we need to hold a door open, it becomes obvious.)

The theoretical modifies the moral: What we know and do not know about a situation can drastically change its moral meaning. (This is why we feel manipulated if someone omits facts when trying to persuade us of something.)

The theoretical modifies the practical: The relevant facts of a situation determine how we respond to it. (Missing facts are one major source of mistakes.)

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My belief:

Our culture has gotten extremely good at generating theoretical and practical knowledge, and at coming to agreements on theoretical and practical matters — where moral agreement already exists.

However, when moral agreement does not exist and the moral disagreement manifests as theoretical and practical disagreement — this is precisely how moral disagreement shows itself — we try to treat the disagreements as theoretical or practical, because that is where we have our best success.

This is our age’s characteristic way of fucking up.

We are happy to theoretically acknowledge differing perspectives — in terms of “I have my taste and interests, you have yours.”

We are also more or less comfortable with treating morality as either a matter of belief (as essentially theoretical) or of obedience to laws (as essentially practical) — but we are deeply resistant to understanding morality as something greater and irreducible to theoretical or practical truth. (Think about getting into Heaven. You have to have believed the right facts and disbelieved falsehoods. You have to have done the right actions and refrained from the wrong ones to get in.)

Few of us, however, have actually moved our intellectual bodies from one part of reality’s room to another and seen what actually happens to what we see.

We have not inhabited multiple moral perspectives.

This is a whole different order of practical knowledge from the simple acquisition of new skills and new experiences we call “being experienced.”

Consequently, we are unaware of how different moral perspectives modify theoretical and practical reality. We lack the theoretical apparatus to conceptualize or discuss morally-rooted theoretical disagreements, and we have no constructive practical response to morally-rooted practical disagreements. We see what we see — and we assume we are seeing reality as it is, while the other is looking through subjective goggles and seeing things in a distorted, self-interested, and possibly depraved way.

And we congratulate ourselves that we know nothing but what our blameless, sinless, moral way of life has shown us. And when others have been blameworthy, sinful and immoral — whether they’re a criminal, lawyer, liberal, fascist, hypocrite, scribe or pharisee — it is to our credit that we lack firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be that way. We can read the law, recognize what is evil, and throw rocks to our heart’s content.

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Very few people have practiced the spiritual nomadism advised by Nietzsche and seen for themselves that rigid adherence to moralistic law preserves the delusion that we possess morality, and is often upheld precisely for the sake of preserving that delusion.

Fact is, we are horrified at the possibility that the world we look at through our own moral perspective — our own knowledge of good and evil — does not give us an unconditioned God’s-eye-view of reality.

We remain completely unreceptive to the importance of disagreements in showing us our own limitations and orienting us to what is greater than ourselves, and the source of all moral significance — value — or to use a thoroughly-abused word: love.

This is the kind of insight philosophy gives us, but we hate philosophy because it is this kind of insight we do not want. Philosophy shows us how invisible our ignorance is, and it makes us permanently humble and prepared to discover that we are wrong where it never occurred to us wrongness or rightness could even exist.

To think dialectically means to move beyond the conceptual dichotomy of true versus false, and to think more in terms of degrees of truth. An assertion can be outright false, but an assertion can also be true in some sense, but insufficiently true.

To adopt this way of thinking is not to reject the dichotomy of true versus false, but rather to recognize it as insufficient, since the most consequential and controversial disagreements are rarely done justice when approached in those terms.

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An individual is not obligated to question every one of his beliefs. Very few beliefs can withstand serious scrutiny, and this includes useful beliefs that allow us to live good, productive lives. However, if a belief becomes problematic — we know it when it happens — then we are not free to ignore the belief or to answer it however we please. We have to question the belief until we have a satisfactory answer.

Finding a satisfactory answer often entails finding a more satisfactory question than the one originally answered with the old belief.

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Is it possible that the point of answers is questions? That answers are what give us access to our questions? That the intelligibility of the world comprises the questions we know how to ask?

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Respecting another person means not only finding validity in the positive content of his beliefs, but in the negative content of his questions, doubts, criticisms.

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A group is not obligated to question every one of its beliefs. Very few beliefs can withstand serious scrutiny, and this includes useful beliefs that allow a group to exist as a cultural entity. However, if a belief becomes problematic — we know it when it happens, because controversy breaks out — then we are not free to ignore the conflict or to answer it however one group or another pleases. We have to question the belief until we have a satisfactory answer.

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Irresolvable conflicts — individual and social — require dialectic.

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“True, but not true enough” is far more common, more disturbing and more difficult to resolve than “false.” True and false are objective, factual matters. “True enough” and “true, but not true enough” are a perspectival matter, and they cannot be resolved by purely objective means.

A delusion in the theory of revolution. — There are political and social visionaries who hotly and eloquently demand the overthrow of all orders, in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity would then immediately rise up on its own. In these dangerous dreams, there is still the echo of Rousseau’s superstition, which believes in a wondrous, innate, but, as it were, buried goodness of human nature, and attributes all the blame for that repression to the institutions of culture, in society, state, and education. Unfortunately, we know from historical experience that every such overthrow once more resurrects the wildest energies, the long since buried horrors and extravagances of most distant times. An overthrow can well be a source of energy in an exhausted human race, but it can never be an organizer, architect artist, perfecter of the human character. — It is not Voltaire’s temperate nature, inclined to organizing cleansing, and restructuring, but rather Rousseau’s passionate idiocies and half-truths that have called awake the optimistic spirit of revolution, counter to which I shout: “Ecrasez l’infame!” [“Crush the infamy!” In his letter to d’Alembert on November 28, 1762, Voltaire was referring to superstition.] Because of it, the spirit of enlightenment and of progressive development has been scared off for a long time to come: let us see (each one for himself) whether it is not possible to call it back again!

I take theoretical possibility for granted: any truth can be re-conceived in myriad true ways (and infinite false ways).

But theoretical possibility is much broader than practical possibility, which is narrowed by a number of limiting factors. One of these limiting factors is social possibility. If nobody feels dissatisfaction with things as they are, many possibilities are never even glimpsed, much less entertained, explored, pursued or actualized.

Dissatisfaction and deep diasagreement is the opening up of social possibility.

Arrogance – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare; from ad– ‘to’ + rogare ‘ask.’

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A person can think he is the best at something and not be arrogant. The question is whether he values superiority enough that he would acknowledge and honor a superiority that he cannot claim for himself. If so, he is not arrogant, but excellent.

A person can think he inferior but not be humble. The real question is whether he values superiority that belongs to someone else or resents it because it is not his own. If he resents superiority because he knows he is inferior, his “humility” is actually self-loathing.

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Arrogance and self-loathing are  two sides of the same coin: the incapacity to love superiority for its own sake, regardless of whose it is. Both love only what can be claimed as one’s individual, exclusive property. Whatever exceeds it is denied.

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What bothers us about both arrogance and self-loathing is neither is prepared to allow anyone to manifest his own particular form of superiority, in service to others or even themselves, if that threatens its own sense of being unsurpassed.

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Incidentally: Rogue – ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (denoting an idle vagrant): probably from Latin rogare ‘beg, ask’.

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Individuals can be arrogant, but nothing is as arrogant as a populist mob. And who do the populist mobs attack? Those they resent. They “go rogue” and indulge in a mass-solipsist arrogance. All mob violence is preceded by invalidation of viewpoints outside of the mob view, denial of any obligation to converse or understand, and finally revocation of human status of the other.

Thesis: Academia should be a haven from the world of business.

Antithesis: Academia should become more like business — be more results-driven and efficient.

Synthesis: Academia and business should be more like each other. Academia should continue to cultivate theoretical ideas, but apply, test and actualize the ideas in the practical realm — but business should also make itself more hospitable to intellectual life, starting with revisiting its fundamental theoretical and moral presuppositions.

Being blind to the existence of a problem is altogether different from seeing a solution. But when is “I don’t see the problem” ever said as a confession of ignorance?

There’s also the common case of sensing the presence of a problem, and trying to answer it before the question is really understood, like a child trying to feel out the answer of a barely grasped math problem.

Compared to recognizing a problem clearly defining it, inventing solutions is trivial — which is precisely why everyone wants to bypass the problem and skip straight to ideation. And, of course, denial is easier still.

Big positives and big negatives drive people to action. People are inspired and energetic and/or 2) feel an urgent need to make a change.

A big zero keeps people in habitual non-action: a situation drains people of the energy and inspiration to change it, while remaining just barely tolerable. Dullness is as stable as death.

For some, cleaning up means moving a mess from plain view to another place where it cannot be seen. For others it means putting the mess in order, so the mess stops being a mess and becomes organized material. Either way, the mess goes away.

The same is true for solutions. For some, a solution is something that makes a problematic situation stop feeling problematic. The problem is put away in an answer, and the matter is settled. For others, a solution means clarifying a problem — putting a problem in order so the material becomes intelligible and manageable.

But with both cleaning up and solving a problem, one must have a place to put things. In cleaning up, one needs shelves, drawers, closets, boxes, jars, etc. In finding a solution, one must have concepts that can organize and accommodate the relevant features of the problem.

Where messes and problems persist, it’s often the same culprit: things don’t have a place, and we don’t know what to do with it all. Things get stuffed wherever there’s room until nothing else fits, and things quickly get out of control again.

Despite appearances, he real work is not essentially moving the mess to some other place. It is working out where things should go so they can be accessed, used, put away and kept orderly throughout. But for many people thinking and “getting to work” are two entirely different things. They jump straight to moving stuff around. This is true with organizing physical messes, but it is doubly true for organizing intellectual messes. Thinking about how to think is exponentially more painful than the already onerous task of intellectual reflection. So, most people just use the categories they already know and automatically start stuffing facts into them until they no longer see a problem.

It takes time and willingness to think to really organize and systematize. In most situations there’s little time, many distractions, and the pressing need to maintain appearances. And also, we get overwhelmed by messes, and prefer to avoid them. But it is this anxiety about messes, and desire to hide them that is the seed of sloppiness, both physical and intellectual.

The ad hominem argument is our chief means of muting the humanity of others. It strips others of the most human quality: the capacity to teach.

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When we take an objective stance toward another person, this means is we are not open to being taught by them.

We might learn from the other, but we are trying to learn through observing behaviors, as physicists learn about the behavior of matter and energy. The other’s speech is interpreted as one more kind of behavior, which we comprehend in the terms of our own understanding.

When we pursue being taught, we allow the teacher to convey to us his terms of understanding.

A teacher’s understanding manifests most concretely in how he comprehends, and so, the attempt to comprehend observable aspects of reality as the teacher does is one of the more reliable routes to understanding. The teacher shows us something, tells us what he sees, and we try to conceive it so we see for ourselves what he has described. But when we see, we conceive it our own way. To stop conceiving our own way means to temporarily open ourselves to chaos so a new understanding can be born in us. It means braving anxiety, perplexity and dread for the sake of new insight.

For this to happen a student must be aware that some aspects of truth are fixed and invariable, but other aspects of truth are variable. The fixed aspects provide us points of reference in coming to share the variable aspects, just as we use fixed landmarks to direct a friend to a meeting-place. It is the variable aspects of truth that make it matter to us. Sharing the variable aspects of truth with others makes togetherness palpably real.

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A fact is acquired by understanding. Insights are the acquisition of a new way to understand.

Some insights are partial, like scientific paradigms. Philosophy aims at the deepest and most comprehensive insights. Philosophy voluntarily wrangles with perplexity. Reading philosophy is submitting to being taught, dying to outworn insights and being inhabited by new insights, again and again.

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Between the bit of reality we readily grasp with our minds (the already-conceivable) and the realities that are altogether beyond the grasp of human intelligence (what is inconceivable on principle) is a strip of reality that could be grasped on principle if we knew how to grasp it (the potentially-conceivable). We’re comfortable with the already-conceivable and the inconceivable, but that middle region is terribly uncomfortable.

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Reality can be sliced and diced innumerable ways. Many articulations of reality are valid (though this does not mean that all articulations of reality are valid).

A pizza can be sliced into 4, 6, 8 or 12 slices, and none of these ways are wrong. However, to someone who has only seen pizzas sliced into quarters, a slice of pizza can come to mean not only a division of a whole, but specifically a one-fourth division — mainly because no other division had ever been considered. If someone speaks of a pizza sliced into twelve, which is still somehow, miraculously, still only one pizza, despite having 3 times as many slices as a normal pizza. It is at once a single pizza, but also, somehow, three.

If we mistrust the person telling us about this 12-slice pizza, we reject his claim out of hand.

If we trust him, we might take it on faith that in some mysterious way beyond human comprehension, this pizza exists simultaneously as one pizza that is also three pizzas.

Both of these responses preclude teaching and learning.

Both of these conclusions show no faith in the other as a teacher.

If you think about it, most of the words we use to talk about subjectivity have the character of being situated in some particular situation. Our personalities are described in terms of dispositions, attitudes, orientations, understandings, perspectives, and points-of-view and stances on various topics (from Greek topos, ‘place’).

Subjectivity has a locative relationship of in, and the word “in” is very frequently used to describe subjective states. We are “in love” or “in a mood” or “in turmoil” or “in a bad place”.

In a subjective relationship, there is no distance between knower and known: the relationship is between whole and an involved part of that whole. The knower participates (takes the relationship of a part within a whole) in what is known. Even the act of knowing falls inside what is to be known. The understander and the understood change one another in the act of understanding, in a feedback loop *.

An objective relationship is fundamentally different. Objectivity is characterized by distance (dis– ‘apart’ + stare ‘stand.’) between knower and known. The knower knows what is known from a distance and is not affected and does not affect what is known.

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When we think about subjectivity as something that is in our head, and our head as something that is in space that ultimately contains it, we “objectify” subjectivity and deprive subjectivity of what it essentially is. Subjectivity is not shaped like any object, it actually shapes the objects within it and puts them into meaningful relationship. Subjectivity has the shape of the entire world, and it concentrates itself precisely in that part of the world that is relevant and significant to us as we think objectively.

Objectivity and subjectivity are not side-by-side opposites. There is no distance between subjectivity and objectivity. Objectivity stands inside subjectivity, and is a product of subjectivity. But that does not make objectivity “merely subjective”. Much of the apparent irrationality and arbitrariness of subjectivity is a product of its being misframed in objective terms. Logic still holds, because logic is subjectivity itself, following its own laws of thought.

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Part of the reason we prefer to think objectively is that it is much more natural. It is relatively easy to comprehend an object. We can “wrap our minds around it”.

But subjectivity is a kind of being that not only wraps itself around us, but is in part, actually who we are — perplexes us, fills us with a sort of dread that we find difficult to live with.

Is it any wonder that when we think about the universe, or our own planet, our culture, a marriage, a friendship, a conversation, or even a garden — these things that exceed and envelope but include us — we almost reflexively remove ourselves and view them as something set apart? But in doing this, we expel ourselves from who we really are. We self-alienate in order to feel a godlike comprehensive comprehension of all-that-is.

To “know” subjectivity we need to know a more humble intellectual relationship. We must orient ourselves within it, relate out to it, and give over to its involving superiority over and within us.

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Interhuman relationships are not essentially objective. Not only is every Other ultimately mysterious to us — our own relationship with the Other reveals things about who we are that would otherwise remain unknown. When we gather in mutual understanding, we participate in a third and greater kind of being present who moves us as the conversation has itself through us, and we are more ourselves than when we were alone.

*

In one sense a seed grows and becomes a tree. In another sense, a bit of garden, a seed, organizes more and more of itself into a tree.

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* NOTE on feedback loops: A student of chaos theory may recognize that this implies that a subjective understanding, being nonlinear, is radically unpredictable. The outcome of even the simplest mathematical nonlinear processes, despite proceeding in a perfectly ordered and inevitable way, cannot be predicted. In a nonlinear process the only way to know what will happen is to let it happen.