All posts by anomalogue

People inside-outside

Philosophy

I think I took more from Gadamer than I realized. I think I may have introjected that understanding into my reading of Buber, too, though I am not sure how much.

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Some distinctions:

1) an empathetic, reconstructive understanding of the subjectivity (that is the way of seeing) of fellow-subjects

2) a sympathetic, participatory understanding of shared subjectivity (a seeing-with)

3) an objective, psychological understanding of a behaving, communicating fellow-person

4) an objective, participatory understanding of one’s interactions with and reactions to another discretely distanced behaving, communicating fellow-person.

1a) – 4a) the mere awareness and acknowledgment of each of these distinct ways of knowing, apart from their practical application

1b) – 4b) the practical application of this knowledge

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Knowing a dynamic from the outside and knowing how to participate in a dynamic from the inside are entirely different matters.

Myth of the framework

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

According to Bernstein (quoting Popper who coined the phrase) the “‘Myth of the Framework,’ is a metaphor which suggest that ‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language,’ and that we are so locked into these frameworks that we cannot communicate with those encased in ‘radically’ different frameworks or paradigms.”

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When you understand what people like Bernstein, Kuhn and Gadamer are actually trying to do, watching the spectacle of what they appear to be doing to people who approach hermeneutics (and related problems) from philosophically naive perspectives (both “for” and “against”) is funny but exasperating. The naive opponents manifest precisely the principles they attempt to deny. The naive proponents tend to take positions Bernstein is trying to overcome and become relativist caricatures: living strawmen for the naive opponents to successfully attack.

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Part of the reason I have become less enthusiastic about personality typologies over the last several years is that they are so easily used to assert the Myth of the Framework.

An intersubjective indication of God’s personhood

Philosophy

I reviewed some old posts last week and was happy to discover that I liked them. Here’s a rewording of one of them:

  • Another person exists to us in at least two ways: as fellow objects and fellow subjects. The subjective aspect of other people here is called “the other”.
  • The subjective influence of other subjects is experienced as a change in one’s self.
  • A change in one’s self is not experienced primarily as a change in one’s own qualities as an individual person-among-people, but as a shift in the entire world on the whole and in many parts simultaneously. In other words…
  • A change in self (manifested as change in the experience of entire world) is a holistic change.
  • Subjectivity pervades the entire world, and in fact is the whole world; it is not localized in an individual’s mind. Mind is not localizable, and therefore is not objective-form.
  • Intersubjectivity, then, is experienced as a change in the whole world, attributable to the subjective influence of the other.
  • To the degree that it is radical, change in subjectivity is impossible to understand prior to the change. It is understandable only in retrospect. This kind of change is practical transcendence.
  • Anxiety (or angst or dread) is the premonition of a radical change in subjectivity. Anxiety is a reaction to impending transcendence.
  • Perplexity is the yet unfinished radical change in subjectivity – in the whole world. It is the pain of transcending.
  • The impulse to defend oneself against subjective influence is the fending off of anxiety and subsequent perplexity.
  • Denial of the existence of truth is commonly a defense against the subjective influence of other.
  • The subjectivity of the other is transcendent. The relationship with the other, we-hood is also transcendent.
  • An I knows the other in participation in we-hood.
  • Each we is a greater self, a whole within which each I is a part.
  • By participating in we-hood, an I senses its situation within greater selfhood.
  • Each we is embedded in yet greater we
  • The concept of an ultimate We points to personhood of God.
  • An image of God: The principle common to self composed of instincts; a friendship composed of selves; being that arises where “two or more are gathered”.

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To get a clearer sense of how I understand subjectivity see my second post, “a plan for a short video clip”.

Coercive argumentation

Philosophy

At this moment I am completely uninterested in coercing people to believe against their will answers to question they have no interest in asking. For me there is no pleasure in conversation where the other party is interested primarily in how my points can be invalidated.

I am not saying that debate is useless. Some people enjoy siege and defense, and plenty of real good can come of it. But if you keep your house locked up and rain down arrows and pour molten lead on the head of everyone who comes knocking at your door, this will narrow the range of guests joining you at your dinner table.

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Perhaps some of the best truths must be invited in before they can be known. What basis is there to accept as true only ideas that can overpower your best intellectual defenses?

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For a debater truth is that which wins debates.

The twin fears

Philosophy

One one hand, we don’t want to be tyrannized. On the other hand, we don’t want to be alienated.

We want to be connected to other individuals and belong to some human circle of some breadth, but not at the expense of having our individual particularities and potentialities suppressed or condemned.

Temperamental and circumstantial variability between people can lead to disagreements on what is threat and what is threatened: some will say individual being is threatened by the tyranny of social being; others will claim that social being is threatened by the alienating effect of individual being exalting itself at the expense of all other considerations.

Philosophical minds who see tyranny as the greatest danger tend to gravitate (or levitate?) toward the liberation of radical subjectivism. Philosophical minds who see alienation as the greatest danger tend to pursue the common ground (or groundedness) of objectivism.

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These fears point toward two metaphysical poles of consciousness, which in my metaphysical manifold (the star diagram) is the vertical axis. The lower pole represents fragmentary being – instincts that flow “up” into our awareness from the semiconscious and apparently unconscious regions of our minds. The upper pole represents the unification of fragmentary of being in greater scales of being, the kind of being of a person absorbed in a conversation or in love.

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Anxiety toward the upper pole tends to see unification as necessitating suppression of essential differences – trending ultimately toward a tyrannical uniformity. In response, the upper pole is denied or an intellectual tourniquet is applied at some scale, either at the level of individuality, or at the level of the romantic couple, or of the family, or of a circle of intimates, or even of a political party, a nation, a religious sect. (One comfort of a self-idolizing collectivity: the members always find ready agreement among themselves that what they worship is the God, or some analogue to God. Solipsism can infect being at any scale, not only individual minds. Ideology can be seen as mass solipsism.)

Anxiety toward the lower pole tends to see the instincts as unwelcome disruptions that destabilize unity. The very existence of certain unacceptable impulses is denied or generalized into voiceless indistinction – packed into categories such as “the sinful nature of man”, or “the unconscious”, or “neuroses” – with the practical consequence that certain instincts are marginalized and denied a place in greater scales of being. An intellectual tourniquet is applied somewhere below the motivations that disrupt acceptability, perhaps at the level of action, or speech, or thought, or acknowledgement, or even awareness.

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It is interesting to observe that the twin fears justify and reinforce one another.

A person who fears the “upper pole” does so because the fearers of the “lower pole” provide them ample grounds for fear: the collectivities that fear the irruption of instincts really do create circumstances hostile to individuality, full of taboos, compromising social requirements and distractions from what one experiences as personal destiny.

Conversely, the individuals allergic to every kind of being that exceeds them while requiring something of them – (such people usually don’t mind the concept of greater being as long as it stays hermetically sealed in a non-practical “beyond”, and will often orient their lives around this theoretically-omnipotent, practically-impotent Transecndence) – will sometimes reject entire categories of ethical behaviour, or even morality as a whole, and in so doing destroy the possibility of authentic participation in being beyond individuality and its multifarious insticts. It may appear to seek intimacy with other people, but what it really seeks is stimulation of its instincts in response to other people (which it confounds with “love”).

The antitheses provide one another a legitimate enemy. They are founded on a single obsolete conception of being.

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Culture will not live in the median between the dominant antitheses of our time.

Culture will not live in the compromise between the individual and the collective, or the dualism of subject and object, or the babble of relativism and absolutism, or the distinguishing of artifice and nature, or the separation of (neutral) observation and interpretation, or the existence or nonexistence of God.

These antitheses can only be resolved in practical transcendence, in a different way of understanding.

Not a textbook

Biography, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism

I cannot believe how much I am enjoying rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I have a couple of exciting new leads: Paul Feyerabend – who is certain to be a terrible influence on me (consider the title of his main work: Against Method) – and Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist. The last time I read this book was in early 2006, and the two leads of that reading were Kuhn (paradigms) and Gadamer (fusion of horizons), so anyone who has spoken with me at any length at all will immediately understand the impact Bernstein has already had on me.

(I’m gradually acquiring the entire bibliography of  Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, and my library is becoming even more home-like.)

What’s fascinating about Bernstein is that his books appear at first glance to be closer to textbooks than original philosophical works, but that is not the case. He does original philosophy in the medium of comparative discussions of other people’s thinking. His philosophy is deeply social, but this does not mean he places the locus of his philosophy outside of his own understandings or his own experience. (It is understandable why someone unfamiliar with his mode of thought might see it that way. This is actually one of the issues he addresses in his writing.)

I buy lots and lots of books for my friends. I’ve given more copies of this book away than any other book.

The books of my life

Biography

I had another amazing morning reading Bernstein. As I’ve said before, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism triggered a major turning point in my intellectual life. Rereading it, I’ll also say it is one of the clearest, most insightful and most useful books I’ve ever read. I meant to post some excerpts from what I read this morning, but now I want to make a list of the books that have changed me.

1987: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The idea paraphrased by my ethics professor, “A good man has learned to love what is good,” has dominated my ethical thought since I heard it. A taste for virtue is cultivated through habit.

1993: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
This was my first glimpse of the purpose of education, beyond mere training and credentialing. I read this right after I graduated from college, and I’ve ached over wasting my time in school ever since. I don’t think this is an especially great book, but it did inspire me to educate myself and it dislodged me from my shallow “liberalism”.

1995: Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones
This was my first genuinely literary experience – a story meant less as narrative than an existential demonstration – and my first exposure to someone I recognized as experiencing the world in a distinctive way that was similar to my own experience. I didn’t fully realize how unusual my experience of the world was until I found myself feeling at home in Borges’s stories and essays.

1995: Carl Jung’s Psychological Types
Learning that I was a particular type, and not completely unique, that other recognizable types existed (very differently from me) around me, and that I could relate to them better by understanding their typological perspective were earth-shattering discoveries. I was obsessed with personality type for a decade.

1996: Houston Smith’s The World’s Religions
Smith’s chapter on Buddhism persuaded me to study and practice Theravada Buddhism. This was the point when I became serious about spiritual knowledge. The experience of meditation showed me a number of my fundamental truths: the composite nature of being, the ephemerality of consciousness, the autonomy of thoughts. This was also the first time the nations of the world made sense to me and had cultural reality: nations were characterized by the religions that formed their character.

2001: Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language
This book grounded my professional activities (design) in my spiritual interests, and triggered an ecstatic psychosis that lasted five years.

2003: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche intensified my ecstatic psychosis – and iteratively destroyed my conceptions of life and forced me to reconstitute them. Under his influence I re-grounded myself in something akin to philosophical idealism/existentialism/phenomenology and began to understand poetry and religious texts in an immediate way. The experience of reading Nietzsche was something I struggled to describe. Even the insights I had reading him defied language, and the need to communicate became increasingly painful over time.

2006: Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism
Bernstein showed me that philosophy, despite its apparent individualist character, is in fact rooted in the social. Bernstein gave me language for my experiences with Nietzsche. At first, I thought the value of Bernstein and those he inspired me to read (Gadamer and Heidegger) was merely the capacity to describe the hermeneutic process, but over the years the substance of Bernstein’s philosophy has become as important to me as Nietzsche’s.

2008: Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man
Buber opened the transcendent dimension of the inter-human and social for me – the Thou – the “where two or more are gathered in my name” – and caused me to reconsider morality and the ethics of many forms of existential philosophy and spirituality. In fact, many philosophies are attempts to persuade the thinker to practical solipsism (I’ve called it “artificial autism”) – a self-protective insulation from genuine inter-human experience. The existentialist ideal is to live in subjectively inert parallelism, each subject surrounded by objects enclosed in the thinker’s own autonomous subjectivity. The ethic of the existentialist is this: I will behave as an object within your sole subjectivity if you will return the favor to me. The existentialist is alergic to the idea of shared subjectivity: the subject is essentialy individual.

Feeling panoptic

Ethics, Philosophy

One of my favorite philosophical feelings is looking out on the world and seeing every relevant problem roughly settled. Unknowns and dangers remain, but everything is in its place, doing what it must do and ought to do.

I think this is the feeling happy old men have when they walk around on land they own and love.

It may be the ideal mood of introverted sensation (of the Jungian personality typology).

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I’m calling this mood and this sense of things panopsis. (ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek panoptos ‘seen by all,’ from panoptes ‘all-seeing’ + –ic .) The optical root of the word is key.

The kind visualizations I do, when successful, induces panopsis in regard to a problem and how to go about thinking about it.

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Panopsis might be a gentle form of ideology, or it might be the worst kind of ideology in larval form. It might be fundamental to sanity, or it might be something more ominous. The morality around this state of mind is problematic for me.

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According to Buber:

The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.

According to Levinas:

In religions and even in theologies eschatology, like an oracle, does indeed seem to ‘complete’ philosophical evidences; its beliefs-conjectures mean to be more certain than the evidences – as though eschatology added information about the future by revealing the finality of being. But, when reduced to the evidences, eschatology would then already accept the ontology of totality issued from war. Its real import lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality; it does not consist in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality…

The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision – it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type – which this work seeks to describe.

I didn’t abandon Levina because I thought he was wrong.

But then, according to Nietzsche:

What is romanticism? – Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fulness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and who seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type, and that included (and includes) Schopenhauer as well as Richard Wagner, to name the two most famous and pronounced romantics whom I misunderstood at that time – not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, as one need not hesitate in all fairness to admit. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, owing to the excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed – if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence – for logic calms and gives confidence – in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.

Thus I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist; also the “Christian” who is actually only a kind of Epicurean – both are essentially romantics – and my eye grew ever sharper for that most difficult and captious form of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to those who need it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the commanding need behind it.

Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or super-abundance that has here become creative?” At first glance, another distinction may seem preferable – it is far more obvious – namely the question whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely; they can be interpreted in accordance with the first scheme (which is, as it seems to me, preferable). The desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely.

The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first, by gratitude and love; art with this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things. But it can also be the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion – one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. This last version is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music – romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture.

(That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism, a classical type – this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseperable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word “classical” offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future – for it comes! I see it coming! – Dionysian pessimism.)

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It might be possible to dismiss Levinas as a romantic pessimist if I view him through Nietzsche’s optic. However, this type of dismissive viewing is precisely what Levinas is calling into question in his work, and I cannot shake off that question. But hermeneutically engaging romantic-pessimist thought… is it dangerous or unhealthy? I think it probably is. I’ll return to Levinas when I have happiness to waste.


Parallax and intentionality

Biography, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I had been using the metaphor of parallax for a couple of years before Zizek’s Parallax View came out. The entire book turned out to be structured around the parallax metaphor and he used it essentially the same way. At that point in my life I was inclined to interpret that kind of coincidence as either an inevitable rediscovery of core esoteric truths or as some sort of synchronicity.

Once I learned about the connection between Hegel and Marxism, though, I realized parallax is one of the most universal and obvious examples of the dialectic form (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). If the dialectic form is a pre-existing cultural entity – and not a minor or obscure one, either – it is possible that the “rediscovery” of it was a lot more guided than it seemed to me at the time. I may not have been taught it explicity, but it is not difficult to see how it could be absorbed passively.

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The key to understanding passive cultural absorption is realizing objective conceptual thinking is only one of several forms of understanding a mind has available to it for interrelating and unifying the multifarious parts and aspects of its experience.

Naive thinkers are marked as such by their incapacity to distinguish the objective form of thought (which is ontological) from the objective being of a thing “thought about”. This observation is itself not “objective”: it exists as what I have been calling an intellectual move, or “the dance”. It’s the fundamental insight of late Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists.

Maybe I picked up the the Pragmatist dance from following along, trying to understand – trying to think-with a philosophical author, as opposed to thinking-about the apparent subject matter presented by the author in my own way, by my own pre-existing habitual moves. Maybe having been raised Unitarian-Universalist, which was a major tributary of Pragmatism, made me receptive to thinking in that way. Maybe there was a temperamental predisposition. At any rate, later, when I learned the counts and the names of the steps and the history of the dance’s invention and development, it was a factual consummation of something super-factual.

It gave objective form to a transmissible form of essentially subjective truth. It made it easier to share. Before, I’d have to demonstrate it, or indicate it with strange analogies.

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I had this thought last week and forgot to write it down:

Can we learn essentially subjective (that is, existential) truths from other subjectivities, or are we limited to objectivity – learning objective facts about subjectivity from one another?

Are we subjectively inert, sealed inside our own temperaments, and our own experiences?

Another big question: If we can learn essentially subjective truths from one another, is that best achieved through talking about subjectivity – through psychologizing? A theme I’ve encountered repeatedly among thinkers working from the Pragmatist and the Phenomenological traditions is intentionality: that there is no such thing as thinking without an object of thought. Thinking divorced from intentionality is nonsense.

Perhaps sharing a problem with another subjectivity, a problem that involves coming to a deep understanding for the sake of being able to collaborate on solving the problem is a more direct route to subjective learning than psychologizing.

I’ve even wondered if psychologizing isn’t ultimately a defence against sharing psychology – a counterfeit intimacy used as a block against authentic intimacy with the other – a sterile mutual self-exploration where shared experience is founded on sameness. Otherness is distant, sealed on the far side of an experiential membrane – never pursued, never approached, never welcomed. The radical other is an object of fascination, or fear, or mystification to be contemplated or classified but never touched.

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I see art as essentially bound up with subjective sharing.

Lesser art depends on recognition. It calls out to those who already know. Art decays into nostalgia and then pastiche.

Great art makes new knowers.

Philosophy is thought-art.

Reckless claims

Philosophy

My point of view: There is no metaphysical individual. Individuality is entirely immanent.

A modern point of view: To view one’s individuality as essentially real and placed spatially within a monistically material world…

A perennially pernicious point of view: To identify one’s individual consciousness with the monad…

To see one’s individual consciousness as a metaphysical entity within an essentially conscious monad…

Three years with hermeneutics

Biography, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Rereading Bernstein after three years, I’m tempted to say (very tentatively) that Bernstein influenced me as radically as Nietzsche did.

Where he led me was a infinitely more vulnerable than where I was before (which, though it was painful, was tough and explosively ecstatic) but I can’t help but believe it was a movement toward something superior, at least on days when my thought is clear.

Much of spirituality is just crude philosophical self-defense. Even much or most of Christianity-Judaism is a reversion to the old pre-Judaic religion. Reading Bernstein put an the end to all that for me, and that is why so many people who were allies (in metaphysical individuality) before began to intuit a sort of treason, even before I became conscious of it myself.

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This morning I reread the section of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism that gave me the word I desperately needed to designate the bizarre world-altering experience I’d had reading Nietzsche: “hermeneutics”. I remember the relief I felt when Bernstein quoted this passage from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

Design thoughts

Brand, Design, Etymology

Solution – A product or a service that is used because it is wanted, needed, or otherwise required.

Solution provider – An individual or collective entity with a solution to offer.

User – The consumer of a solution; for example a customer, an employee, a member of an organization, an operator.

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Usefulness – A useful solution satisfies a user’s known and/or unknown functional needs. Usefulness is a solution’s functional value.

Usability – A usable solution removes functional obstacles that discourage a user’s acceptance of the solution. Usability is a solution’s ease-of-use value, or more accurately the absence of pain-in-the-ass anti-value. Ideally, usability is imperceptible, being essentially the absence of negatives.

Desirability – A desirable solution fosters a user’s goodwill toward the solution, emotional inclination to accept the solution. Desirability is a solution’s subjective value.

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User experience  – A solution viewed from the perspective of the user. It signifies a user-empathic perspective on design: that the proper locus of design is not in the artifact itself but between the artifact and the one who uses it, in the experience the user has interacting with the artifact to satisfy a need or want. (In this sense user experience is form of practical idealism; see definition below.) The experience is not confined to the duration of the interaction, but also in how it is remembered and anticipated; nor is it confined to the artifact itself but into the user’s life, particularly to the effects of the interaction and to the entities perceived to be responsible for the effects, both good and bad.

On-brand user experience – On-brand user experience thinks not only about the design of the experience of a solution but also about how the experience with the solution will affect the experience of the provider of the solution and ultimately the enduring relationship between the user and the provider.

Experience is the conducting medium through which the brand flows. Brand is made visible through the graphic identity, articulated through messaging, expressed through voice and tone, demonstrated through prioritization and structuring of content and function, embodied through the feature set and given conduct and character through interaction design (a kind of body language).

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On-brand usefulness – An on-brand useful solution satisfies a user’s known and/or unknown functional needs in a way that enhances the usefulness of the solution provider, and naturally reinforces the user’s perception of the provider’s indispensability.

On-brand usability – A on-brand usable solution removes functional obstacles that discourage acceptance of both the solution and the provider’s other solutions, (ideally together as a single integrated system), and naturally reinforces the user’s perception that the provider is easy to deal with.

On-brand desirability – An on-brand desirable solution creates goodwill toward the solution that naturally extends to the solution provider.

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Empathy – The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. ORIGIN: Early 20th cent.: from Greek empatheia (from em– ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’)

Context – The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. ORIGIN: late Middle English (denoting the construction of a text): from Latin contextus, from con– ‘together’ + texere ‘to weave.’

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Idealism – Any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind. ORIGIN: late Middle English: via Latin from Greek idea ‘form, pattern,’ from the base of idein ‘to see.

Pragmatism – An approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek pragma, pragmat– ‘deed.’

Perspectivism – The theory that knowledge of a subject is inevitably partial and limited by the individual perspective from which it is viewed. ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘optics’ ): from medieval Latin perspectiva (ars) ‘science of optics,’ from perspect– ‘looked at closely,’ from the verb perspicere, from per– ‘through’ + specere ‘to look.’

Empiricism – The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. ORIGIN late Middle English : via Latin from Greek empeirikos, from empeiria ‘experience,’ from empeiros ‘skilled’ (based on peira ‘trial, experiment’ ).

Design etymologies

Etymology

There’s considerable overlap with similar etymological posts, but I like to place the words together so I can take them together and see them as a whole.

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Design – Late Middle English (as a verb in the sense of to designate): from Latin designare ‘to designate’ (based on signum ‘a mark’), reinforced by French designer. The noun is via French from Italian.

Concept – Mid 16th cent.(in the sense of thought, frame of mind, imagination): from Latin conceptum ‘something conceived,’ from concept– ‘conceived,’ from concipere (see conceive ).

  • Conceive – Middle English : from Old French concevoir, from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take.’
  • Comprehend –Middle English : from Old French comprehender, or Latin comprehendere, from com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
    • Prehensile (capable of grasping, chiefly of an animal’s limb or tail) – From French prehensile, from Latin prehens– ‘grasped,’ from the verb prehendere, from prae ‘before’ + hendere ‘to grasp.’

Synthesis – Early 17th cent.: via Latin from Greek sunthesis, from suntithenai ‘place together,’ from sun– ‘with’ + tithenai ‘to place.’

  • Thesis – Late Middle English: via late Latin from Greek, literally ‘placing, a proposition,’ from the root of tithenai ‘to place.’
  • Antithesis – Middle English (originally denoting the substitution of one grammatical case for another): from late Latin, from Greek antitithenai ‘set against,’ from anti ‘against’ + tithenai ‘to place.’ The earliest current sense, denoting a rhetorical or literary device, dates from the early 16th cent.

Analysis –  Late 16th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek analusis, from analuein ‘unloose,’ from ana- ‘up’ + luein ‘loosen.’ (antonym: ‘uptight’)

  • Paralysis – Late Old English , via Latin from Greek paralusis, from paraluesthai ‘be disabled at the side,’ from para ‘beside’ + luein ‘loosen.’
  • Decision – Late Middle English (in the sense of bring to a settlement): from French decider, from Latin decidere ‘determine,’ from de– ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut.’
  • Precision – Mid 18th cent.: from French precision or Latin praecisio(n-), from praecidere ‘cut off,’ from prae ‘before’ + caedere ‘cut.’

System – Early 17th cent.: from French systeme or late Latin systema, from Greek sustema, from sun– ‘with’ + histanai ‘set up.’

Pattern – Middle English patron, as in something serving as a model, from Latin patronus ‘protector of clients, defender,’ from pater, patr– ‘father.’ . The change in sense is from the idea of a patron giving an example to be copied. By 1700 patron ceased to be used of things, and the two forms became differentiated in sense.

  • Matrix – Late Middle English (in the sense of womb): from Latin, ‘breeding female,’ later ‘womb,’ from mater, matr– ‘mother.’
  • Matter – Middle English : via Old French from Latin materia ‘timber, substance,’ also ‘subject of discourse,’ from mater ‘mother.’

Metaphor – Late 15th cent.: from French metaphore, via Latin from Greek metaphora, from metapherein ‘to transfer,’ from meta– ‘over, across’ + pherein ‘to carry, bear.’

Analogy – Late Middle English (in the sense of appropriateness, correspondence] ): from French analogie, Latin analogia ‘proportion,’ from Greek, from analogos ‘proportionate,’ from ana– ‘up’ + logos– ‘word, reason.’

Paradigm – Late 15th cent.: via late Latin from Greek paradeigma, from paradeiknunai ‘show side by side,’ from para– ‘beside’ + deiknunai ‘to show.’

  • Anomaly – Mid 17th cent.: via late Latin from Greek anomalos (from an– ‘not’ + homalos ‘even’)
    • Anomie – 1930s: from French, from Greek anomia, from anomos ‘lawless.’
    • Antinomian – Mid 17th cent.: from medieval Latin Antinomi, the name of a 16th-cent. sect in Germany alleged to hold this view, from Greek anti– ‘opposite, against’ + nomos ‘law.’
    • Nominal – Late 15th cent. (as a term in grammar): from Latin nominalis, from nomen, nomin– ‘name.’
    • Denomination – From Latin verb denominare, from de– ‘away, formally’ + nominare ‘to name’ (from nomen, nomin– ‘name’ ).

Model – Late 16th cent.(denoting a set of plans of a building): from French modelle, from Italian modello, from an alteration of Latin modulus (from Latin, literally ‘measure,’ diminutive of modus.).

  • Mode –  Late Middle English (in the musical and grammatical senses): from Latin modus ‘measure,’ from an Indo-European root shared by mete; compare with mood.
  • Mood – Old English mod (also in the senses of mind and fierce courage), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch moed and German Mut.

Represent – Late Middle English : from Old French representer or Latin repraesentare, from re– (expressing intensive force) + praesentare ‘to present.’

  • Present (verb) – Middle English : from Old French presenter, from Latin praesentare ‘place before’ (in medieval Latin ‘present as a gift’ ), from praesent– ‘being at hand’.
  • Present (noun, in the sense of in this time or at this place) – Middle English : via Old French from Latin praesent- ‘being at hand,’ present participle of praeesse, from prae ‘before’ + esse ‘be.’
  • Interest – Late Middle English (originally as interess): from Anglo-Norman French interesse, from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important,’ from inter– ‘between’ + esse ‘be.’ The -t was added partly by association with Old French interest ‘damage, loss,’ apparently from Latin interest ‘it is important.’

Style – Middle English (denoting a stylus (an ancient writing implement, consisting of a small rod with a pointed end for scratching letters on wax-covered tablets, and a blunt end for obliterating them), also a literary composition, an official title, or a characteristic manner of literary expression): from Old French stile, from Latin stilus.

Gestalt – 1920s: from German Gestalt, literally ‘form, shape.’

Grok (understand intuitively or by empathy, or to establish a rapport.) – mid 20th cent.: a word coined by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), American science fiction writer, in Stranger in a Strange Land.

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Use / Useful / Usable – Middle English : the noun from Old French us, from Latin usus, from uti ‘to use’ ; the verb from Old French user, based on Latin uti.

Desire – Middle English : from Old French desir (noun), desirer (verb), from Latin desiderare (see desiderate).

  • Desiderate – Mid 17th cent.: from Latin desiderat– ‘desired,’ from the verb desiderare, perhaps from de– ‘down’ + sidus, sider– ‘star.’ Compare with consider.  (NOTE from anomaloge: shouldn’t we also compare with ‘president’?)
    • Consider – Late Middle English : from Old French considerer, from Latin considerare ‘examine,’ perhaps from com– ‘together’ + sidus, sider– ‘star.’
    • President – Early 17th cent.: from French presider, from Latin praesidere, from prae ‘before’ + sedere ‘sit.’
    • Decider – Late Middle English (in the sense of bring to a settlement): from French decider, from Latin decidere ‘determine,’ from de– ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut.’

Morality, good and evil

Ethics

The properties of objects generally remain constant or change predictably according to rules.

The properties of subjects may be constant or at least predictable, but they are also capable of drastic and seemingly arbitrary change. Change can come with little warning. When change comes it can alter the qualities of a subject so radically that the subject can even become unrecognizable. People say “you’ve become a stranger” or “I don’t know you anymore.”

If objects were like subjects a glass of water weighing a few ounces today could weigh fifty pounds tomorrow. The glass and its contents could simply vanish.

It would be difficult to exist in a world where this happened. But consider this: Our fellow subjects, capable of such arbitrary change, are (at least normally) what matters most to us in the world. To a large extent we are nourished, supported and sustained by our relationships to other subjects.

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Behavioral disciplines gives subjects constancy and predictability. They provide assurance to those who love us, depend on us, or simply co-inhabit the world with us that we will remain with them as who we are, neither withdrawing nor encroaching in any way that harms them. It stabilizes our shared inter-subjective social world to levels approaching that of our shared objective one.

When I discuss morality and ethics as something good, this goal of behavioral discipline is one I have in mind.

When I attack morality I am attacking something different: the claim of one person to the right not only to require another person to be reliably and usefully what they are but to decide for them what they ought to be and how they ought to be useful. To the degree a morality justifies regarding another person in predominantly functional terms to the exclusion of subjective considerations – that the morality demands of other subjects not only the stability of objects but also the passivity of objects – I regard that morality as illegitimate. The extreme of moral illegitimacy, where subjective considerations are completely eclipsed by functional ones is evil.

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To regard another subject subjectively is to regard the subject as essentially a subject: the center of a world that overlaps one’s own. The essence of morality is response to transcendent subjectivity. It begins with the acknowledgment of Namaste, and actualizes through living, enduring, mutually-beneficial relationship. In a mutually-beneficial relationship all members of the relationship feel improved by their own standards for participating in the relationship.