Two very different cries for help:

1. Help! We need to figure out what we ought to do!
2. Help! I need someone to execute tasks for me!

These cries belong together and should not be separated.

Some people only want to sound the second cry, neglecting to sound the first; and some people only want to answer the first cry, while neglecting the second.

“Being in this together” means
both sounding and responding
to both the first and the second cry.

*

Help! We need to figure out what we ought to do!

Is there another way to see this? — a way that is more productive and more inspiring — that really brings out what matters to all of us?

Let’s look at it from different angles.

What about this way? or, even better… this…

Yes! If we were to take this approach we’d need to do these eight steps…

[Idea semistolen from the One Minute Manager. Yes, I am reading pop-business books. It seems possible that management is the most interesting experience design problem in the world.]

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man has exceptionally acute hearing

The blind king utilizes him as his super-ear. Whenever his majesty needs help hearing the very quietest sounds he assigns the one-eyed man to the task of listening.

What she wants to say, she has no words for. Her words are so open, ambiguous, indeterminate and vague that they could mean anything.

He only says what can be communicated. His words are so univocal, unambiguous, specific and defined that they can mean nothing of importance.

*

He wants her to communicate clearly. Like a clockmaker he carefully disassembles her sentences, gently cleans the parts, applies a light coat of fine oil, and reassembles them. He establishes definitions, places the elements in syllogistic order, and he sets the meaning in smooth humming motion.

In the end he has helped her speak very clearly, and it has nothing to do with what she needed to say.

*

Her language suffers from indiscipline. She tries to carry the significance of everything at once and communicates nothing.

His language suffers from discipline. He says only what can be communicated with perfect reliability and so he says nothing of significance.

*

She errs toward infinity.

He errs  toward zero.

A concrete example of dialectic:

One person insists he is looking at a vase (thesis). The other insists he is looking at two faces (antithesis). In talking to one another, each party realizes together that both are seeing an optical illusion (synthesis), which is a kind of being whose essence is to accommodate apparently contradictory but valid ways of seeing.

The deeper understanding of the synthesis comprehends both views as valid-as-far-as-they-go (each can now see either a vase or two faces), but it also sees the incompleteness of each view as it excludes the other.

The assertion that the image is of a vase, and the assertion that the image is of two faces — these assertions are at the same ontological (being) level. The manner in which the image is (the “being” of the picture) is the same in each case: depiction of a thing. The assertion that the image is an optical illusion, however, is ontologically deeper. The being of an illusion is different in kind from the being of a depiction of a thing, and it accommodates both its own being and the being of depiction and holds them in relation to one another.

*

It’s a lot easier to help someone see an optical illusion if he’s seen one before. We can appeal to his own prior experience.

Imagine how a description of “seeing” an optical illusion would sound to someone who has never seen an optical illusion. “You are going to turn this vase into a pair of faces? Are you some kind of sorcerer?”

They’re “ontologically blind”, which means they simply have no place in their thinking for the optical illusion’s mode of being. If they try to explain it to themselves or to others it will be described in terms of what they do already know. They’ll use “ontic” terms — the manner of existence that physical objects have.

Until they figure out what you’re trying to show them, they’ve got several options:

1. They can miss the possibility that they might not understand yet, and simply declare your claim — as they misunderstand it — to be false or true.
2. They can reduce what you are saying to something they do grasp, and consider the matter settled. (It’s some sort of poetic expression, or a vague moral lesson of some kind, a truth refracted through an unfamiliar culture, an uncannily resonant hallucination, etc.)
3. They can admit they don’t know what you’re talking about and not worry about it.
4. They can admit they don’t know what you’re talking about, but let their non-understanding bother them until they see for themselves what you mean.

The situation we are in, if we wish to live dialectically: We are aware that are constantly falling into attitude #2, but if we stay aware of that fact, we can find our way back to attitude #4.

*

A moral dialectic:

Thesis: One should maintain his psychic constancy, and be someone to himself and others (or to put it negatively, one should resist akrasia, moral incontinence).

Antithesis: One should be responsive to the voices of others, which means to be open to change (or to put it negatively, one should avoid ideology and hubris).

Synthesis: One should be prepared to dialectically deepen.

This means to pursue authentic understanding of others by extending oneself to them. Rather than simply shift one’s perspective, one retains his perspective, but learns to see it from an ever-broadening vantage that includes the perspectives of others. One “can go” over to the validity of the other, and one can go back over to where he was, but his perspective also moves vertically, and sees the whole landscape of differing perspective from an overview. The lower perspectives are seen as valid from within (“emic”), but are also interrelated from without (“etic”) within a greater emic view. This greater emic view will certainly someday be grasped from an etic view when it is dialectically surpassed and grasped from without, but until that day, it is universally true. This fact does not transport us into infinitude, it only places us in relation with it, and shows us that we are in blessed, eternally-futile pursuit, and it is this futility that is immortality.

From Nietzsche’s Gay Science:

The golden watchword. — Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no longer behave like an animal: and he has in truth become gentler, more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal is. Now, however, he suffers from having worn his chains for so long, from being deprived for so long of clean air and free movement: — these chains, however, I shall never cease from repeating, are those heavy and pregnant errors contained in the conceptions of morality, religion and metaphysics. Only when this sickness from one’s chains has also been overcome will the first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the animals. — We stand now in the midst of our work of removing these chains, and we need to proceed with the greatest caution. Only the ennobled man may be given freedom of the spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy and for the sake of no further goal; and in any other mouth his motto would be perilous: Peace all around me and goodwill to all things closest to me. — With this motto for individuals he recalls an ancient great and moving saying intended for all which has remained hanging over all mankind as a sign and motto by which anyone shall perish who inscribes it on his banner too soon — by which Christianity perished. The time has, it seems, still not yet come when all men are to share the experience of those shepherds who saw the heavens brighten above them and heard the words: “On earth peace, good will toward men.” — It is still the age of the individual.

Every misunderstanding, by definition, feels like an understanding. To argue that you do not misunderstand in the basis of the fact that you do have an understanding, only demonstrates that you are unaware of what understanding involves.

*

To look someone in the eye and tell them, despite their protests that you have misunderstood, that you do in fact understand them: this is despicable. The more powerful you are the more able you are to avoid being confronted with this fact. The powerful can enlist yes-men to reinforce their delusions of comprehensive mastery.

*

Some people are at their worst when they are weak. They lack the strength to live up to — or sometimes even to remember — their own ideal.

Other people are at their worst when they are strong. They lack the constraints necessary to bring them into line with any persistent ideal. Such people have never known a reason to be principled except to avoid punishment. Escaping the possibility of punishment is tantamount to escaping obligation.

*

It takes a long time for people who have been unfree to realize that freedom is neither anarchy nor is it holding the power to enslave.

Being free means being free for one’s own responsibility.

Being responsible means to be able to respond to one’s situation.

To be able to respond to one’s situation requires that one understand it.

To understand one’s situation is to recognize that every situation involves both objects and other people.

To recognize that every situation involves both objects and other people, requires that one know the difference between I-It relationships and I-Thou relationships.

Far too few people in positions of power know anything other than I-It.

I-Thou means: “You can change my world if I hear you.”

*

The mania for quantification, scientificality, objectivity and its consequent objectivist reductionism of human beings to resources to utilize in order to meet one’s own objectives… this is the consequence of a species of intellectual vulgarity.

So far, the field of User Experience has allowed itself to be utilized as a tool for behavioral manipulation. At the heart of User Experience, though, is a principle opposed to this use: that a person should be understood and related to not as an It object but as Thou. The techniques of User Experience are further along than its self-awareness, which is a good thing. Sometimes ignorance serves as a protective shell. The seeds have been planted, now they can grow and establish themselves. The flowers and the fruit will come. Gradually, as more and more businesses learn that genuine human relationships with customers and with employees (that is, I-Thou relationships) work better than I-It manipulations that seek to simulate humanity, a different class of business leader will emerge.

At first, the shift will be strictly utilitarian, but I hope eventually we will acquire a taste for it, and I look forward to the day when we look back and shudder at this time of technical control, misguided servile work ethics, neglect of community and children, and the ugly, meaningless and stressful work lives so many accepted as normal.

We will be amazed that we treated workers and students for depression rather than treating workplaces and schools for depressingness. “It was so obvious that it was the workplace that was mentally ill. Why didn’t people see this?”

(This is my practical “metastatic expectation.” It’s not a prediction, but an ideal to pursue.)

If one knows knowledge only as a kind of mastery, one misses the most important dimension of knowledge: the knowledge of how to recognize and relate to what exceeds and masters us. The condition manifests in the conception of knowledge in terms of theories and methods, and nothing beyond that. When one is mastered by this conception of knowledge, one is always unaware of it.

What survives?

In the crucial moment when one is faced with the hardest decision, two stances can be taken: 1) “I will survive this at all costs.” 2) “I will serve the higher good at all costs.”

“I” might be an individual, or “I” might be an organization. Whether an individual or an organization says it, the moral significance is identical.

*

Unfalse

Most of us think that the higher good is something that is not oneself. This negatively stated truth is not false, but it is also not really true. It is more unfalse. It is like asking what color an apple is, and getting the answer “not blue” or “not the sound of a flute”.

True – false – unfalse

Alive – dead – undead

*

Self-sacrifice: What is sacrificed to what?

It is generally acknowledged that an individual who knows no good higher than his own individual being is despicable.

An equally important, but less acknowledged fact is that an organization who knows no good higher than its own collective being is despicable.

Only that which can self-sacrifice is worthy of self-sacrifice.

*

Anatta

When someone has recognized that what sustains him as a “self” vastly exceeds the sphere of individuality… and he recognizes this sustaining being as more essential to his being than “himself” (as he and the world takes him), he will sacrifice what is less essential to what he experiences as more essential. This is neither altruism nor selfishness, but something beyond the antithesis and incomprehensible from within it.

*

The circular dance of techne

The altruism vs selfishness debate is identical in form to the atheism vs fundamentalism debate.

The antithetical sides disagree on the truth of an impoverished assertion that neither side recognizes as impoverished. Their agreement runs deeper than their disagreement, and their common ground is in fact their common error. Neither side actually wants to find agreement, because to find agreement is to dissolve the ground upon which both sides have taken their stand. The sides seek each other out for argument.

But the agreement is not an agreement of fact. The agreement is practical.

They argue according to methods derived from their shared presuppositions and through adhering to the methods, preserve their joint-illusion regarding the horizon of reality by never moving outside of them.

In this movement there is an unconscious purely practical agreement to disagree, preserved in how the argument is conducted.

The argument is a sort of dyssynetic dance whose technique moves the partners in a tight, invisible circle. The dance of techne is a circle dance.

*

When the unseen common ground of a disagreement is a common error, the disagreement cannot be resolved except through dialectic.

Two passages from The Gay Science:

Two happy ones. — Certainly this man, notwithstanding his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the acutest observers. For it seems that he never makes a mistake, although he constantly plays the most hazardous games. One is reminded of the improvising masters of the musical art, to whom even the listeners would fain ascribe a divine infallibility of the hand, notwithstanding that they now and then make a mistake, as every mortal is liable to do. But they are skilled and inventive, and always ready in a moment to arrange into the structure of the score the most accidental tone (where the jerk of a finger or a humor brings it about), and to animate the accident with a fine meaning and soul.

Here is quite a different man: every thing that he intends and plans fails with him in the long run. That on which he has now and again set his heart has already brought him several times to the abyss, and to the very verge of ruin; and if he has I as yet got out of the scrape, it certainly has not been merely with a “black eye.” Do you think that he is unhappy over it? He resolved long ago not to regard his own wishes and plans as of so much importance. “If this does not succeed with me,” he says to himself, “perhaps that will succeed; and on the whole I do not know but that I am under more obligation to thank my failures than any of my successes. Am I made to be headstrong, and to wear the bull’s horns? That which constitutes the worth and the sum of life for me, lies somewhere else; I know more of life, because I have been so often on the point of losing it; and just on that account I have more of life than any of you!”

*

In media vita (In mid-life). — No, life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year, — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me, the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not a trickery! — And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others, for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure, — for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge” — with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily and laugh gaily, too! And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?

A nice dialectical point from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson:

“This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

—Terminiello, 337 U.S. 1, 37 (1949) (Jackson, J., joined by Burton, J., dissenting).

Everybody seems to understand the “Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact” differently. It’s an ontological question: what dies in the suicide? Physical people? The legal institutions that uphold the Bill of Rights? The popular credibility of the Bill of Rights? The democratic tradition that makes liberty possible? The principles of our government? The vision?

I’ll say one thing: To decide between two things, both must be understood or one has no decision to make.

From Black Elk Speaks:

It was now nearly the middle of the Moon of Frost in the Tepee. We heard that soldiers were on Smoky Earth River and were coming to attack us in the O-ona-gazhee. They were near Black Feather’s place. So a party of about sixty of us started on the war-path to find them. My mother tried to keep me at home, because, although I could walk and ride a horse, my wound was not all healed yet. But I would not stay; for, after what I had seen at Wounded Knee, I wanted a chance to kill soldiers.

We rode down Grass Creek to Smoky Earth, and crossed, riding down stream. Soon from the top of a little hill we saw wagons and cavalry guarding them. The soldiers were making a corral of their wagons and getting ready to fight. We got off our horses and went behind some hills to a little knoll, where we crept up to look at the camp. …

By now more cavalry were coming up the river, a big bunch of them, and there was some hard fighting for a while, because there were not enough of us. We were fighting and retreating…

We wanted a much bigger war-party so that we could meet the soldiers and get revenge. But this was hard, because the people were not all of the same mind, and they were hungry and cold. We had a meeting there, and were all ready to go out with more warriors, when Afraid-of-His-Horses came over from Pine Ridge to make peace with Red Cloud, who was with us there.

Our party wanted to go out and fight anyway, but Red Cloud made a speech to us something like this: “Brothers, this is a very hard winter. The women and children are starving and freezing. If this were summer, I would say to keep on fighting to the end. But we cannot do this. We must think of the women and children and that it is very bad for them. So we must make peace, and I will see that nobody is hurt by the soldiers.”

The people agreed to this, for it was true. So we broke camp next day and went down from the O-ona-gazhee to Pine Ridge, and many, many Lakotas were already there. Also, there were many, many soldiers. They stood in two lines with their guns held in front of them as we went through to where we camped.

And so it was all over.

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, – you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

“The tyrants of the spirit. — The march of science is now no longer crossed by the accidental fact that men live for about seventy years, as was for all too long the case. Formerly, a man wanted to reach the far end of knowledge during this period of time and the methods of acquiring knowledge were evaluated in accordance with this universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everything in the world seemed to be accommodated to man, the knowability of things was also accommodated to a human time-span. To solve everything at a stroke, with a single word — that was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the image of the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that in the domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach one’s goal in the manner of Alexander or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. ‘There is a riddle to be solved’: thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philosopher; the first thing to do was to find the riddle and to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form. The boundless ambition and exultation of being the ‘unriddler of the world’ constituted the thinker’s dreams: nothing seemed worth-while if it was not the means of bringing everything to a conclusion for him! Philosophy was thus a kind of supreme struggle to possess the tyrannical rule of the spirit — that some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and mighty man was in reserve — one only! — was doubted by none, and several, most recently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one. — From this it follows that by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrowness of their disciples and that henceforth they must be carried on with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling. ‘What do I matter!’ — stands over the door of the thinker of the future.”

*

It takes courage to stand between the nothingness of pre-birth and the nothingness of death and be humbly finite — always both wrong and right, always both born and destined to die, always both someone and everyone and everything.

The point is not to avoid being wrong. The point is to be as right as we can possibly be. We will always be a wrong to a degree, because that is how knowing is, and that is how we are.

*

Understanding is finite. Every understanding has its own limits.

Every understanding excludes something that some person at some time will recognize as crucial.

We expose the limits of past understanding and understand in a new way whose limits are invisible to us.

We expose old limits and impose new limits.

(To judge judging as bad and to attempt to refrain from further judging is an unjust act of judgment against judgment.)

*

Anaximander via Simplicius:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

Anaximander via Nietzsche:

Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.

Each time you see the sun, once again, as always, the sun is revealed by particular light.

With each glimpse, particular light, born eight minutes ago, dies in your eye.

*

The sun you see now is the same sun that Adam, Abraham, the pharaohs, the Yellow Emperor, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Christ, Copernicus, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Pol Pot saw.

*

It is interesting to consider that the process you essentially are is powered by the sun.

We — each of us and all of us — are articulations of the sun.

I knew a dude (in the most precise sense) in high school who spelled out “Angus Van Osbourne” on his chest with band-aids, and then laid out in the sun in order to inverse-tan the words into his skin. (For the uninitiated, this was a concatenation of the names of the reigning trinity of hard rock at that time, and arguably of all time, Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne.)

*

Yesterday, I printed up small sepia-toned pictures of my heroes and hung them up on my wall, under my hand-painted Bulgarian Christ the Teacher icon, and to the right of my print of Raphael’s School of Athens, included for its tiny depiction of Heraclitus. I am not finished yet, but so far I have the young Friedrich Nietzsche (wearing the exact same eye-glasses frames I wear), a middle-aged Jorge Luis Borges, an elderly Martin Buber, an elderly Hans-Georg Gadamer, and an elderly Black Elk. In the near future I plan to add Christopher Alexander, James Dicky and Edwin Muir. I am also considering adding Rene Guenon, Jane Jacobs, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.

I told a good friend of mine about what I was doing and he surprised me by observing: “Wow. That’s sort of adolescent.” He didn’t mean it in a mocking or critical way. That was just how it struck him, and he observed it out loud because we’ve known each other for a long time and we say exactly what we think to each other, almost as a demonstration of faith.

It was surprising how true the statement was, but it was even more surprising to me, knowing what impelled me to hang these little picture, how much it enriched my understanding of “adolescent”. I might as well have band-aided “Hans-Jorge Luis Nietzsche” on my chest. It’s the same thing. It is an attempt to weave oneself into some kind of cultural fabric. It is an attempt to put context around my life within which I understand life. It is a longing for the feeling of home.

It is a step toward what Heidegger calls appropriation of tradition.

*

I’ve annoyed the hell out of people by screwing up the flow of conversation, looking up passages I felt compelled to quote. “Why can’t you paraphrase it?” I can’t paraphrase it because the content is not only the factual content. It is also the warm and beautiful truth that I am bringing in the present a mind I love and allowing that mind to be present in the conversation. It is making continuity between past and future. It makes me feel like a human being to quote one of my heroes. This is why most of my posts are packed with cross-references and links to other people’s thoughts. It is important to me that I have a heritage, and to quote is to make the my heritage immediate in the form of continuation of tradition.

*

A friend of mine told me the story of Pushkin’s last words, how on his deathbed he turned to his books and said “farewell, friends.” If you find this moving, let me know.

Heraclitus:

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

Chuang Tzu:

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

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

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

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

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

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