An answer is true only in reference to a question.

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To name something is to answer the question: “What is it?”

That question is set by us.

It is answered through good-faith collaboration between the asking and that which is named.

But the question can be re-asked and re-answered again and again: “What is it?”

. . . .

“It is an object.”

“It is what is here, now.”

“It is an organism.”

“It is something useful.”

“It is something dangerous.”

“It is phenomena.”

“He is a friend.”

“He is someone looking at me.”

“He is someone asking ‘What is it?'”

“He is someone looking at me and asking ‘What is it?'”

“He is someone looking at me and asking ‘Who is he?'”

“He is someone looking at something and asking me ‘What is it?'”

. . . .

To agree on what something is means we have first agreed on how we ask “What is it?”

We aren’t in the habit of questioning such simple and obvious questions.

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Asking creates space for an answer.

A deep personality knows how to ask in many different ways.

An expansive personality is willing to ask in many different ways with others.

When we have no space for an answer, when we lack the capacity to ask the answer’s question, the answer is irrelevant or nonsensical. Or we attach the answer to another question, sometimes with partial success.

*

Sometimes when we refute an answer, what we are refuting is the question.

Sometimes the refutation of a question deprives the other of space. We constrict the other’s world.

Sometimes the refutation of a question deprives the other of shelter. We take away the source of ready answers that protect the other from the vacuum of questions which extends infinitely in every direction from every truth.

*

An answered question is like a bright spot.

An unanswered question is like a dark shadow.

An unasked question is a blind spot, which is neither dark nor light, but is simply nonexistent.

The worst kind of mistake escapes detection by disguising its non-rightness with non-wrongness: it is the correct answer to the wrong question.

Nobody mistakes confusion for understanding.

It is easy to recognize confusion. Confusion is unclear, incoherent, disorienting, unsettling — the very opposite of understanding.

But how do we distinguish misunderstanding from understanding? After all the essence of a misunderstanding is that it appears to be an understanding.

So how do we detect a misunderstanding? What is the tell-tale sign?

That’s the problem: there isn’t one.

*

As long as we believe that misunderstanding announces itself as confusion — or that misunderstanding happens when we try to interpret “reality” and make a mistake — if we think interpretation happens after we perceive reality — we will fail to do the one thing necessary for uncovering misunderstanding. To uncovering misunderstanding we must seriously consider the very real possibility that what we fully and clearly understand might be wrong.

Most of us are oriented toward trying to see how we are right. The key to becoming more and more right, though, is trying to see how we are wrong, and then correcting that wrongness. We will never exhaust our wrongness, but this is how rightness is approached.

*

It is not about right vs wrong. It is about right vs even more right.

It is about a one right vs wrong and another right vs wrong in open dialogue discovering a new and overwhelming shared rightness.

“A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

*

When we do not know how to orient ourselves to a situation we feel apprehensive. We are aware that a problem exists, but we do not know how to orient ourselves to the problem, and the problem lacks definite form.

Posing a question orients us to a problematic situation and gives us an approach for finding an answer. Formulating the question gives the problem an explicit form so we can communicate the problem to others and share it.

A formulated question works like a compass or a sextant, and helps people find common ground and orientation — a shared point-of-view from which problem can be viewed and seen in the same perspective, which is the point of departure for approaching the problem.

Once the question has been posed and formulated, a point-of-view and perspective on the problem has been established, then an individual or community can get to work comprehending the element of a situation, and relate them together as elements of a solution to a problem.

*

A problem that has not yet been resolved into a question is a perplexity. A perplexity can be recognized by the inability to ask meaningful questions, or to account for what the problem is. They also have a distinctive feel: they are unsettling and they tend to arouse anxiety. They are unpleasant. Consequently, people want to resolve perplexities as quickly as possible.

The trouble is, How do we resolve a perplexity?

Many (most?) people see problems, questions and perplexities as essentially the same: they’re the absence of an answer.

Consequently, they try to resolve them all by the same method: Find an answer.

(Think of how many times you’ve heard: “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions.” This sentiment looks positive and action-oriented, and sometimes it is well-founded, especially when used to combat pessimism, cynicism and unproductive fault-finding. However, when it discourages the raising of productive questions, it can ultimately work against decisive and wholehearted action.)

But a perplexity is far more problematic than a question, and it calls for a different response.

A perplexity is rarely settled by answers. It’s resolved by clear questions.

An unasked but answered perplexity remains unsettled and unsettling. Plans founded on such answers are often fraught with controversy, because they’re addressing different problems. Incompatible points-of-view on what should be done are discussed primarily at the level of the concrete decisions around plans or outcomes. The only way to come to agreements is compromising on aspects of the answer. The resolutions tend to have more to do with politics than with the problem itself.

As strange as it sounds, real agreement is founded not on shared answers, but on shared questions.

*

Suzanne Langer says this about questions:

The “technique,” or treatment, of a problem begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it — right or wrong — may be given. If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. We may be right or we may be wrong. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” we will be accused of trying to be cryptic, smart, or “unsympathetic.” For in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question. The questioner feels called upon to repeat his problem. “Then how did the world become as it is?” If now we answer: “It has not ‘become’ at all,” he will be really disturbed. This “answer” clearly repudiates the very framework of his thinking, the orientation of his mind, the basic assumptions he has always entertained as common-sense notions about things in general. Everything has become what it is; everything has a cause; every change must be to some end; the world is a thing, and must have been made by some agency, out of some original stuff, for some reason. These are natural ways of thinking. Such implicit “ways” are not avowed by the average man, but simply followed. He is not conscious of assuming any basic principles. They are what a German would call his “Weltanschauung,” his attitude of mind, rather than specific articles of faith. They constitute his outlook; they are deeper than facts he may note or propositions he may moot.

But, though they are not stated, they find expression in the forms of his questions. A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination. There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense. In this way the intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

In philosophy this disposition of problems is the most important thing that a school, a movement, or an age contributes. This is the “genius” of a great philosophy; in its light, systems arise and rule and die. Therefore a philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them. Its answers establish an edifice of facts; but its questions make the frame in which its picture of facts is plotted. They make more than the frame; they give the angle of perspective, the palette, the style in which the picture is drawn — everything except the subject. In our questions lie our principles of analysis, and our answers may express whatever those principles are able to yield.

*

Gadamer says something similar:

It is clear that the structure of the question is implicit in all experience. We cannot have experiences without asking questions. Recognizing that an object is different, and not as we first thought, obviously presupposes the question whether it was this or that. From a logical point of view, the openness essential to experience is precisely the openness of being either this or that. It has the structure of a question. …

… The openness of a question is not boundless. It is limited by the horizon of the question. A question that lacks this horizon is, so to speak, floating. It becomes a question only when its fluid indeterminacy is concretized in a specific “this or that.” In other words, the question has to be posed. Posing a question implies openness but also limitation. It implies the explicit establishing of presuppositions, in terms of which can be seen what still remains open.

To apprehend (“toward taking hold of”) is to intuit that something in one’s experience is significant, but one cannot yet conceive (“together take”) what is signified, and one is unable to orient (“find east”) oneself to the meaning of this situation (“placement” within a context).

To comprehend (“together taking hold of”) is to resolve an apprehended significance into a concept of a thing. The mind reaches out toward something significant and “takes hold of it” in a way that allows it to be “taken together” as a concept, with an objective form.

But some types of significance are not essentially objective. They do not point to conceptual objects, but rather to situations in which we are embedded as participants (“part takers”). In these situations, if we try to create objective significance (which is what minds find easiest and nearly always try to do) we end up with distorted, “magical” conceptions — things which lack the normal attributes of things.

These kinds of significance are not comprehensible, but that does not mean they are unintelligible. It only means we must find other modes of knowing — relate ourselves to this significance differently.

The two primary modes of knowing a situation are 1) disposition & orientation (knowing how one is situated within the situation), and 2) response (knowing how one’s action will change one’s situation).

When one is relating oneself to a situation, one is trying to understand the nature of his participation in the situation, and how to participate in the situation.

*

In an objective conception, the knower stands beside what is to be known in a side-by-side peer relationship. The knower is distanced from the object (“thrown in front”) of knowledge.

In a subjective conception the knower stands inside what is to be known. The knowledge encompasses the entire situation: the knower and the known together, as well as the knowledge itself which affects the knower’s participation in the situation. This kind of knowledge does not dispense with the objective factors of the knowledge, but seeks to grasp them and relate them to what underlies them and gives them their significance. It wishes to grasp what can be grasped, but also to understand (find that upon which the objective facts stand) the subjective truth (that which has been “thrown under” the situation and makes it intelligible.

(Contrary to popular belief, subjectivism does not have to be non-objective or romantic and anti-objective. The most profound subjectivism is super-objective. Also, subjectivism also does not have to be idealist, at least not metaphysically idealist. In my opinion, subjectivism means that objectivity is a product of subjects, and is best understood as such — through the method of phenomenology. A physics that moves outside the bounds of phenomenology has trespassed into metaphysics.)

*

Think about perspective. One has a point-of-view from which a situation is seen. Some things appear larger and some smaller, according to where they fall in relation to the viewer. They, themselves don’t change size, yet from the point-of-view of the viewer they do, and those sizes change together as a whole based on where the viewer is situated relative to each. One can map the situation from above, but the map is meaningless to that perspective until it is translated into perspectival terms.

Here is what is really interesting about a perspective: It cannot be ascertained and is in fact meaningless without reference to both viewer and objects.

*

To comprehend an apple — an object one can grasp in one’s hand and consume at will — is one kind of knowledge; to understand oneself as a participant in the life of a garden is a very different type of knowledge which contains elements of comprehension within it, but is not reducible to objectivity.

Objectivity, on the other hand is reducible to subjectivity.

But this does not mean that the entities known through objectivity are subjective. We have phenomena, and we have conceptualizations, and we have a sense that phenomena is more than appearance — it is entities existing beyond phenomena showing themselves to us (phainein ‘to show’) — that something transcends mere appearance.  That’s all we have.

But phenomena are always surprising us. We are shown things we do not expect, and these surprises force us to reconceptualize objects, again and again. And sometimes we are surprised so profoundly that we have to conceptualize the world as a whole — our whole situation — transfiguring its meaning.

Surprise is (to use William James’ ugly but apt term) the “cash value” of transcendence: we can never assume our experience has shown us all there is of things. We certainly cannot sanely assume we are inventing what we are shown. Things surprise us, and other people — if we are open to learning from them — are the most surprising feature of reality.

When justifications given and received in a particular field have little relation to the actual accomplishment of the goals and the realization of the purpose of the field — or worse, the goals have not been related to any purpose at all, so that the goals are just free-floating standards that gradually degrade into ends-in-themselves —  that field is out of joint, and needs to be rethought.

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I think a major problem inherent to the modern mindset is to become anxious in the face of things for which we do not already have ready-made names, conceptual apparatus, and easy means of measurement. Rather than say, “I do not know yet how to think about this, much less speak about it clearly, much less measure it.” we instead cynically dismiss it as bullshit, or hopelessly, permanently unclear — or something subjective that belongs strictly in the private sphere. Or we scrape whatever incidental features are measurable off the surface of what we wish to understand, and treat these measurable features as the essence of what is being measured.

When a person says he loves animals or nature, or that humans are just a kind of animal, a question involuntarily flashes through my mind: “Uh oh, does this person hate humanity, and is he using animals or nature as his antithetical ideal?”

Same thing for “realists”: “Uh oh, does this person hate aspects of reality he can’t comprehend and control, and is he dismissing those things he can touch but not grasp as unreal and invalid?”

Same thing for religious folks: “Uh oh, does this person hate this world, and is he subscribing to this alternative beyond-world only in order to disparage this one?”

Same thing for environmental crusaders: “Uh oh, does this person hate business, and is he using environmentalism mainly to condemn business from a new angle?”

Same thing for libertarians: “Uh oh, does this person hate human deliberation and all its messy defiance of clean schematisms, and is he adhering to an impracticable mechanical fantasy in order to treat fully-dimensional human deliberation — and worse, all deliberate collective action — as a political disease?”

This might be another of my typical self-educational revelations that’s literally a matter-of-course fact for those lucky enough to have had classes in this stuff, but:

Is any movement prefixed with “post-” claiming a Hegelian dialectical sublation of whatever’s been moved beyond?

So, an anti-modernist type, who has merely rejected modernism out of hand on moral/aesthetic grounds without fully coming to respectful (if disapproving) terms with it, is essentially different from one who has and has discovered within modernism its own self-negating principle? One operates from an antitheses (romanticism?), the other from what is claimed to be an overcoming of modernism and whatever is claimed to be its antithesis?

Hmmm.

• Demonstrate / articulate: To the degree that something is truly new, really communicating what it means requires iterative demonstration and articulation. Mute doing and empty saying spiral in toward articulate action and substantiated message.
• Authenticity / tact: Being yourself does not mean behaving the same way no matter who is present, and being responsive to others does not mean suppressing yourself. When either self or the other is suppressed the relationship is missing one of its essential terms. One must speak authentically as one’s self, but address the other specifically — that is, say it in such a way that it will be heard by this other person. This does not mean one seeks to please the other, only that one takes the other seriously as one who is there and is hearing in that person’s own way. Tact, as I am defining it here (admittedly oddly), might manifest as intentionally disturbing or angering the other.
• Actual / potential / metaphysical: Articulate every reality that can be articulated, but never reduce reality to what can be articulated. Perhaps the most important thing to be articulated is the relationship between word and the vastness of inarticulate reality. Words are entirely real, but they are not the entirety of reality. (They’re not even the entirety of our own reality (much less what is potentially our reality (much less what is real but will never be ours))). [It’s so liberating to use nested parentheses!]
• Objective / participatory: We want to pull up and out of what we know — maintain objective distance — when in fact we are involved with what we know and participatorily immersed in our knowing and our knowledge.

Years ago one of my uncle argued with me: “In every war, there is torture. In WWII, even, soldiers were known to torture captives. You are acting like this situation is something new.”

The whole problem with this argument is confusing a normative ideal with actual behavior. The difference is not in the behavior of soldiers, it is in the behavior of citizens in evaluating that behavior. And really, isn’t the purpose of a norm to influence actual behavior toward one actuality over another? And if that norm is not perfectly actualizable, is that even relevant to the value of the norm?

In our “realist” and intellectually lax society, we’ve lost this distinction in far too many places.

For instance, when reporting the news, a reporter’s bias is bound to creep in. However, when the norm in journalism is complete and undistorted reporting of the facts of a situation — however impossible this ideal is in actuality — to dispense with the norm on the basis of the continuing existence of distortion is to remove all restraint and to begin a slide from factual news, from which disagreeing parties can begin dialogue, to competing propagandas from which nothing but wholesale rejection of competing perspectives as such — facts and opinion alike — ad hominem — can result. This is a dangerous situation. Where dialogue ends, coercion begins, then violence.

Another case: “Change is inevitable.” Sure, change will happen no matter what we do. Nothing will last forever. But between instant and eternity is a vast range of durations. When we resist change — for instance, when we wish to preserve a favorable state of affairs, or when we try to stabilize our lives for the sake of our sanity and happiness — is it really a futile pursuit simply because that duration isn’t permanent? Does it really make sense to remove the brakes altogether simply because we can’t (and don’t want to) bring progress to a full halt? When we observe that change is inevitable and adjust our norm to fit the facts, we change the fact of our situation and change loses its moderation.

Another case: In hermeneutics, we will never perfectly understand what the author meant and we will always bring our own understanding to what we read, so — the author is dead. The author should not be “privileged”…

Another case: Nobody is perfect. So, let’s accept that and not even try…

Fact is, we are happy to reason this way only when justifies our own ends. But the entire point of reasoning is to reach agreements with others, to be able to make an appeal, and in exchange, we are required to respond to appeals. Only if these standards are applied consistently from case to case, from party to party, from I to you, from you to me, now and in the future are these reasons functioning as reason. Without this principle, reasons are rationalizations, justice is mere justification.

Now, obviously, in actuality we’re never entirely reasonable, but this is precisely why reason is so necessary as a normative ideal.

There’s knowledge, then there’s insight, then there’s post-insight knowledge, then there’s knowledge about the experience of insight in general, then there’s knowledge about the relationship between insight and knowledge. Then there’s putting all of this knowledge and insight into practice. And THEN there’s yet more insight, more  post-insight theoretical and practical knowledge, more knowledge about the relationship between practice (and the concrete) and insight and knowledge… etc.

The scientistic worldview is objective-reductionistic: superficially, it is metaphysical materialism (a world constituted of material and forces within space, of some nature or another); methodologically, it believes that both subjectivity and objectivity is an emergent property of the kinds of entities that can be observed from without and comprehended factually.

The religionistic (my coinage, I think) worldview is subjective-reductionistic: superficially, it is metaphysical idealism. Not only is it true that (quoting the Dhammapada) “mind precedes all phenomena and of mind are all phenomena made” — an indisputable fact, systematically passed over by the scientistic faithful — but that behind the phenomena is an essence (called “noumena”, “the thing in itself”) of the nature of mind or idea.

Both points of view are equally metaphysical and reductionistic. Then there’s phenomenalism that brackets all metaphysical projection and thinks within the terms of phenomena as such.

Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, “Religion as a Cultural System” [available online]:

The thing we seem least able to tolerate is a threat to our powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to create, grasp, and use symbols may fail us, for were this to happen, we would be more helpless, as I have already pointed out, than the beavers. The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate (that is, genetically programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete, not merely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged child, unfortunately been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self-control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sensitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort of anxiety:

[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic function and highest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he cannot construe — the “uncanny,” as it is popularly called. It need not be a new object; we do meet new things, and “understand” them promptly, if tentatively, by the nearest analogy, when our minds are functioning freely; but under mental stress even perfectly familiar things may become suddenly disorganized and give us the horrors. Therefore our most important assets are always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung [world view] and Lebensanschauung [life view]. Consequently, in a primitive society, a daily ritual is incorporated in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making, etc., as well as in pure ceremonial; because the need of reasserting the tribal morale and recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian Europe the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees, to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts. (Langer, Philosophy in a New Key)

There are at least three points where chaos — a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability — threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it — challenges with which any religion, however “primitive,” which hopes to persist must attempt somehow to cope.

My wife says only two things capture the full attention of all her 5th grade students: stories and music.

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The quality of a story of captivation and transport, that the mind of the listener moves effortlessly with the movement of the narrative… isn’t that a quality we would like our lives to have?

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When our lives make sense to us, isn’t that narrative cohesion more decisive than the cleanliness and systematic integrity of the factual parts? In fact, with the exception of a few exaggeratedly scrupulous souls, do people even worry about the epistemological stratum of truth at all? It’s not the substance of life: it’s part of the set. If the set doesn’t distract from the play, it’s good enough.

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An idea to play with: part of what distinguishes paideia from mere technical training is that it imparts a collective narrative to the student, in addition to the more generally recognized practical and factual knowledge. This narrative provides the student with an overarching “why” capable of  unifying otherwise discrete meanings:

• the practical and factual are united as equipment for a desired life;
• individual self and the collective are united as belonging to a group;
• the momentary acting and interpreting self with the self projected in memory and anticipation as character who sees and accepts that he is seen.

Without this narrative,  the act of acquiring practical and factual knowledge is felt to be a meaningless chore which must be coerced from without; the self is alienated and experiences collectives as something to evade and ideally eventually to escape — (remember back when modernists complained of alienation, before it became cool to accept it nonchalantly?) — and a self instinctively shuts out the seeing/narrating others and claims all vision for himself (hubris) or tries to persist in the seeing/narrative of everyone else, and so is always reinventing, retransfiguring, reauthoring, revising, rediscovering what “really happened” (akrasia).

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Meliorism is recognizing that a grand narrative is not discredited when it is credited to human beings.

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This potential narrative unity of life which interprets phenomena morally (as possessing or signifying value) is what I’m talking about when I talk about the heaven yao of the trigram.