All posts by anomalogue

On the sixth day we came

Etymology

We each have a pair of eyes which look out onto the world from slightly different angles. Because of the ordered similarity and difference between the two views the world gains stereoscopic depth.

Likewise, our two ears hear a similar sonic world, but each ear hears some sounds a little louder and some sounds a little softer. Because of the ordered similarity and difference between the two views the world gains stereosonic depth.

The stereosonic depth and the stereoscopic depth are perceived separately but can also be related (to use the word incorrectly) synesthetically to create an abstract depth. (Or is it this abstract depth that gives meaning to stereoscopic/stereophonic depth?)

The abstract depth is confirmed (or established) in our experiences, which are always twofold: reflection on the past related to our ongoing anticipations of the future. Without this play of future and past (which constitutes our present) time would not be time to us. It is hard to imagine that we would be ourselves anymore. I imagine we would be like Edwin Muir’s animals.

They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day we came.

*

On the sixth day we came… We who speak to one another as a fellow I, as a thou. Together we call the world out of empty air.

We who, like pairs of eyes or ears, like the past and the future, bring together in language a stereo-ontic sense of the world, and bring out another divine dimension: the subject.

Without We, I am negativity, a nothing, a void, a dreamed thing populated with images.

*

Like two hands of a common body touching in gassho, two people speaking a common language meet in respect and transcend the illusion of the ultimacy of the ego. We say Namaste or Shalom to someone who hears our voice in world and understands. In dialogue we are changed and renewed and finally understand that in authentic we – dialogical we – none of us can believe he is alone.

*

Namaste/shalom/thou is said dialogically, or nothing is said in the word. It is just idle repetition of a word. All dialogue is practical namaste/shalom/thou. Dialogue is the opposite of idle repetition of words.

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Some of us want to be left alone, except we don’t realize the extent to which we are sustained by togetherness.

The most antisocial man breaks down in solitary confinement almost immediately. The most antisocial thinker must necessarily go insane. He uses the same words, but cannot communicate. Nobody can save him.

Dialogue is what stabilizes our world and makes the primordial chaos of the phenomenal flux solid and real.

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Take note those times when you speak to your friend and lose yourself in conversation; when you are absorbed in your work and forget yourself; when in collaboration nobody knows who thought of what and everybody knows that what the group produced was impossible for any of the individuals; when you speak to someone and only that someone and what is being said is revealed you you as you hear it…

Take note of how you feel afterwards.

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If you can never lose yourself, you can never find yourself.

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Stereo – ORIGIN from Greek stereos ‘solid.’

Parallax – ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French parallaxe, from Greek parallaxis ‘a change,’ from parallassein ‘to alternate,’ based on allassein ‘to exchange’ (from allos ‘other’ ).

Dialogue –  ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French dialoge, via Latin from Greek dialogos, from dialegesthai ‘converse with,’ from dia ‘through’ + legein ‘speak.’

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Love and duality. – What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to ours? If love is to bridge these antitheses through joy it may not deny or seek to abolish them. – Even self-love presupposes an unblendable duality (or multiplicity) in one person. – Nietzsche

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When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 22:34

The literary brand

Brand

A philosophy is the process of coming to vision. The developing vision is in the foreground.

A novel is a story told within a vision. The vision is in the background.

Popular fiction is a story told within the prevailing common vision of the populus, or the popular vision.

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Popular art in general is popular for the fact of its basis in the popular vision.

When the  popular vision is vital, popular art is exciting. When the popular vision is depleted, popular art falls into a pattern of self-imitation, nostalgia, recombination, pastiche and casting about for novelty. The popular culture believes the problem is with the artifacts, but in truth, the popular culture is bored with itself, with the banality of its own vision. However, vision being vision, it cannot see what it isn’t seeing. Vision is its own reality.

Only extraordinary need will make the popular vision do the only thing it can do to revitalize itself: venture out into the unfamiliar, the literary and the philosophical, and learn to see life in a stranger new light.

*

A brand is a story an organization tells about its offering.

Most brands are popular art. They’re satisfactory, momentarily entertaining, but not unique, and they come and go without demanding much or changing much.

Some brands are literature. They are loved by the marginal souls, the canaries in the coalmine who already feel the depletion of the popular culture. But unlike a pop-art brand, the literary brand changes those who “get it”. They come to see by its vision – not only the brand’s offering, but to some degree life as a whole. The literary brand carries within itself a holistic life vision. The literary brand is a seed of popular culture.

A literary brand can change popular  culture, and effect its own popularity. The literary brand’s moment of opportunity is cultural depletion.

Synetic branding

Brand, Synesis

Synetic branding (ORIGIN Greek synesis, understanding, literally “togetherness”) – The art of persuasive alignment of perspective, intended to reveal the unique superiority of an organization’s offerings.

Synetic branding brings an organization’s internal and external stakeholders to a common understanding – a way of seeing and feeling – which binds employees and customers at a level far deeper than the concrete qualities or features of an offering. This does not mean the concrete qualities or features of an offering are irrelevant, however. It means the qualities and features of the product, chosen in light of the synetic brand, manifest the synetic brand’s ideals and simultaneously 1) affirms the bond of agreement between stakeholders* and 2) creates offerings that seem deeply, exactly right. (* Now what is at stake runs deeper than simply a thing, but rather, one’s worldview: what makes the world feel like something stable, coherent and intelligible. A synetic brand contributes to reconsituting the coherence of our badly fractured postmodern world, where even the hope for cohesion – a “Grand Narrative” or a “neutral standard”, or anything at all that could serve as common ground – is scorned, made taboo, laughed at or treated with a deep cynicism that borders on peremptory dismissal. The reason for this is a long history of manipulation, using the need for this coherence as bait. In regard to subjective sincerity, every organization is guilty until proven innocent. Human beings have very sensitive bullshit-detection apparatus. Genuine sincerity is a competitive advantage. Learning how to find the authentic goodness inherent in the culture of an organization, cultivating it, and making it active and visible and communicable is the soul of synetic branding. )

Synetic branding, done well, makes competing offerings seem muddled, imitative or beside the point. (It is like framing, but it is free of manipulation. It is an open, shared framing – the framing one cannot imagine being bettered.)

A synetically-branded organization is animated by the vision of the synetic brand. The organization’s culture is both an expression and a reinforcement of the synesis.

A synetic brand is an outgrowth of a company’s culture, and has its origins there. A synetic brand is not a constructed. It is not built like a machine. It is grown from existing life. It is the cultivation of the collective personality of an organization.

The questions are: Who can this organization be? How does it see what it does and makes. How does it see differently from its competitors? How does its difference in vision affect what it does and make? Where does it lack confidence in its vision and why? How can it gain the confidence to differentiate?

With-ness

Philosophy, Synesis

syn– or sym– (prefix) – united; acting or considered together. ORIGIN from Greek sun “with, together.”

The ambiguity of the “with” of syn-/sym- is interesting. In some cases “with” is actively social, for instance in symposium, sympathy and synagogue. It involves people together with other people. Other times a passive, constructive “with” applies. Some examples are synthesis, symmetry and synapse.

My current favorite word, synesis has the most interestingly ambiguous use of syn-. Synesis is the Greek word for understanding. It means essentially with-ness, or togetherness. I like thinking that synesis means simultaneously that 1) the parts are grasped together as a synthesis, 2) in such a way that this togetherness can be shown to others and seen with them.

(I also enjoy thinking about the synoptic (“together-seen”) gospels the same way. On one hand, each gospel tells the whole story as a single summary picture, but on the other hand, the three synoptic gospels viewed together tell a much richer story than any one of them could alone.)

Bullshit/chickenshit theory

Philosophy

Bullshit/chickenshit theory started as a work joke, but it has become very useful.

Bullshit – Meaningful, inspiring ideas that that seem to promise practical action with desirable outcomes, but never fulfill that promise and never find application.

Chickenshit – Practical actions that seem like they ought to serve some meaningful purpose, but in fact are meaningless and performed for no reason.

Bullshit is meaning without application. Chickenshit is application without meaning.

Tales of Glorious Unrepentence

Ethics

1) Boost your belligerence by watching this video portrait of a prisoner who tried to escape on a rope ladder made of dental floss.

2) An audio portrait in a similar spirit, Brooklyn Archipelago.

(This American Life is a national treasure.)

3) Years ago I read some mountain biker’s story about a time when he tried to hop his bike through the crotch of a tree and did not make it, and destroyed his bike, busted his face and broke his collar bone. He concluded his story with something along the lines of, “I have learned nothing from this, and will continue to bomb through the woods at breakneck speed risking my life attempting insane feats.”

4) A final offering: my favorite story from early childhood, Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief”. Between a way-too-early exposure to that story, and an equally way-too-early exposure to Beatles Revolver (mamas, don’t let your toddlers groove to “Tomorrow Never Knows”) all hopes for a normal adulthood were killed in the cradle.

Janus

Philosophy

The voice of the marginalized is the password at the gate.

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You walk through, and the door closes behind you. Did you lock yourself in or out?

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Freedom is not being locked in or out on the right side of the door; freedom is being able to pass through.

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Pandora’s box was a tesseract. Inside the box was not-Eden.

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Turn Eden inside-out and it is an object you can possess and consume.

Hubris and akrasia

Philosophy, Synesis

Hubris is what I’ve called solipsism or “artificial autism” – the shutting out of other all other subjectivity except one’s own. It is possible, and in fact is even radically compatible with hubris to psychologize about other subjects, (even with the subjects, themselves in pseudo-intimate conversation) but the psychological practice insulates the hubristic soul from subjective involvement. Empathic objective modeling of motivational systems passes for sympathy (feeling-with); objective theorizing genuine synesis (sunesis, subjective co-understanding).

The hubristic eye is the gaze beneath which every entity is an object, and all knowledge is by definition objective.

History is filled with hubristic personalities, and in fact is dominated by them. For a vivid first-hand account of hubris, see Satan’s monologue in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

*

Akrasia is what I’ve called inconstancy or “failure to hold a shape”, and it is commonly translated as moral incontinence. A vivid example of akrasia is the portrait of Adolf Eichmann in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Many other examples are illuminated in the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity.

Some earmarks of akrasia: 1) A sense of corelessness that wishes to fill itself through surrender to another individual or to some collectivity; 2) an unnerving habit of serial conflicting narratives which carry (or are the manifestation of) equally conflicting value systems (today’s villain is tomorrow’s hero, and vice versa); 3) a deep dependence on other people to believe, reflect and reinforce the narrative of the moment, and in particular the self-characterization of the narrator, and this acceptance and reinforcement of the narrative is the ground of friendship; 4) a strong attraction to certainty, simplicity, non-ambiguity and concreteness; 5) a deep fear of responsibility, which it cannot distinguish from blame.

The akrasic being is a tangled mass of spirits that cannot unify itself as a soul, and feels this disunity as a missing core, which he seeks in a quest for his true self. He seeks himself and he finds himself as a reflected image in the gaze of the hubristic eye. Like the hubristic eye, he knows only  objects; he can only conceive himself as an image, a persona. What he wants to find and be is the best object.

Where the hubristic soul knows only himself as the sole subject, the akrasic being (a soul is precisely what he is not – he is protosoul) lacks all essential knowledge of being a subject. He blindly gropes for subjectivity in his world and feels it in the hypertrophied subjectivity of hubristic other. Now he feels himself to have a soul, but he is only had by a soul, and that soul is not his own.

The redhead dressed in red and green
Sees herself by being seen

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What the hubristic personality loves most is the passivity of akrasia. What akrasia loves most is the simplified strength of hubris. Hubris and akrasia seek one another and combine to create what we recognize as evil.

*

Hubris unifies the world within its self, which appears to it as Principle (or as Atman/Center/Union/Enlightenment/Nirvana/Born-Againness/Authenticity, etc., etc., etc.,); but hubris cannot bear to participate in unification beyond self. It might acknowledge a “beyond”, or even claim to be oriented by it, but nothing above the self is permitted to impinge on its prideful autonomy. Hubris might change, but it will never be changed, nor will its world be changed. Hubris will not participate, because participation means being part within a surpassing, containing whole. Hubris is the totality. Hubris is the surpassing, containing whole.

Akrasia lives in an arbitrary flux of instincts, which appears to it as Freedom. It submits to dominance as long as the dominance can assert itself, but the minute the dominance lets up akrasia tells a new liberation story and finds a new dominating power to liberate it from its former tyranny. Each story is the true one. Each tyrant is the saviour.

Analogy, category, criteria

Philosophy

Analogy points at a pattern of likeness.

The likeness is emphasized over the unlikeness. Analogy establishes a schema of relevance.

Category labels the analogy.

Analysis of the analogy yields criteria.

Criteria clarify a category’s schema of relevance.

Through Logos

Philosophy

One of my core beliefs: Being arises through language. An individual is cohesive, reflective and whole, not because he is a biological unity, but because he is a dialogical unity.  He is a dialogical unity thanks to the running conversation constantly unfolding in his mind. The quality of that conversation is bound up with the seriousness with which his inner voices pursue comprehensive, enduring, respectful agreement among themselves.

Talking to yourself does not mean you are insane. On the contrary, talking to yourself clearly and respectfully is sanity itself.

The same holds true for groups of individuals: a group is cohesive, reflective and whole thanks to the running conversation that takes among its members. The quality of that conversation is bound up with the seriousness with which the members pursue comprehensive, enduring, respectful agreement among themselves.

Individuals and groups go wrong for the same reason: Voices are suppressed, humanity denied.

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I am going to pull together a number of thematically related passages from the ancient world.

1.

Chuang Tzu, one of the principle thinkers of Taoism, told this famous story:

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

2.

The Dhammapada opens with the Buddha (which means the “awakened one”) saying:

All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made. If with an impure mind one speaks or acts, suffering follows him in the same way as the wheel follows the foot of the chariot’s drawer.

All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made. If with a pure mind one speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.

3.

Around the same time one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus made some cryptic statements about something he called Logos:

Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it — not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it — at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth.

My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.

…

We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.

…

Although intimately connected with the Logos, men keep setting themselves against it.

…

Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.

4.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus (who is himself called the Logos, “The Word”) said:

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels…

5.

The author of the fourth Gospel, John, opened with this famous passage:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

A student of phenomenalism or existentialism might at this point be tempted to say with Solomon: There is nothing new under the sun.

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Mind arises through logos and mind is the basis of all being. Spirit is synonymous with mind.

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dialogue: from dia– “across, through” + legein (logos) “speak, word.”

diabolic: from dia– “across, through” + ballein “to throw.”

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Try this on: Dialogue, “through words”, unifies subjectivities. The diabolical “throws across” the boundary of the individual’s own mind all other subjectivities. The diabolical subject takes himself to be the sole subjectivity. In other words, the essence of the diabolical is solipsism.

Diabolism refuses to acknowledge subjectivity beyond one’s own, not only theoretically but practically. The practical consequence of denying other subjectivities is refusal to engage in dialogue.

The practical consequence of acknowledging other subjectivities is dialogue.

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From Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan’s monologue:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

*

Returning to the original point, an individual can be solipsistic, but it is also possible for a group to be collectively solipsistic, to view its own self-understanding to be the sole understanding, and to agree among itself that its self-agreement is license to refuse dialogue with other groups or individuals beyond its horizon. Behind this anti-dialogical attitude is a belief that it can use coercive force as a substitute for agreement. They say: “I will not reason with you. I do not have to reason with you. Your desires and objections mean nothing to me.” Have you heard this before? Whether an individual says it, or a couple says it, or a group says it, or a whole nation says it: whoever says it undermines dialogue and incarnates the anti-logos.

When minds gather in the spirit of logos, each regarding the other as “thou”, as a fellow subject like himself, and allows dialogue to do its miraculous horizon-fusing work and the conversation has itself through them: whoever does this overcomes the darkness of the diabolic and incarnates the logos.

Excerpt from a letter to a friend

Philosophy

… I just finished Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Bernstein’s thesis is that modernity has lost consciousness of higher orders of reason, and that the best postmodern thought, beneath all apparent chaos and contradiction, is a shared concern for trying to recover that higher reason and figure out how to put it back into practice. The fact that this is a shared problem that belongs to our time is as important to him as the content of that problem. This is Bernstein’s ethic, and I love it. It gives his writing warmth and generosity. He’s always asking: How do we agree? What are our shared concerns?

In Bernstein’s view modernity confuses all reason with episteme and all practice with techne. He argues that above all determinate reason and method is phronesis, which is a far more open mode of reasoning, which justifies rather than proves, and resolves in dialogue. While episteme tends toward determinacy, phronesis tends toward pluralism. Since phronesis provides episteme much of its ground, episteme loses its coercive force once phronesis enters the picture. It turns out that phronesis governs not only the humanities and the social sciences but also the hard sciences, most conspicuously when science goes into crisis and revolution. The revolution is resolved when scientists are able to leave the too-human deliberation of phronesis and return to the comfortable determinacy of episteme and experimental techne.

Bernstein suggests that postmodernism’s real telos – or best telos – is not relativism but the reestablishment of awareness and practice of phronesis in our culture. I’m sure Bernstein would admit that it’s pretty obvious that many postmodernists are charlatans inclined toward relativistic readings. The real horror of relativism is not that they deprive us of the solidity and stability of truth, but that they deprive us of the ability to appeal to reason. Relativism undermines dialogue, always at first in the name of defense against rational coercion. Every belligerent nation calls its military its “defenses.” The telos of relativism is escaping rule of reason and replacing it with alternate forms of social and political coercion. This also seems to be the telos of most forms of absolutism, including perennialism. The perennialists use gnostic claims to destroy dialogue, and that is why I resist them even while I agree with them superficially on their metaphysical conceptions.

To put it in dialectic form, there’s objectivism/absolutism that claims that truth is determinate and existent, there’s relativism that claims that determinate truth is non-existent and that pluralistic opinion is all that exists, and there’s the synthesis that transcends objectivism/absolutism vs relativism by asserting that episteme is determinate, but that truth is more than episteme. When episteme is brought under phronesis in dialogue, truth becomes both reasonable and pluralistic. A new, truer opposition emerges: 1) dialogue, and 2) anti-dialogue sustained by the false dichotomy of absolutism versus relativism.

I’ve come to the point where I see Christ as the embodiment of dialogue. Dialogue requires mutual respect: seeing your neighbor as yourself, essentially a fellow subjective being who as such deserves consideration – who in dialogical “fusion of horizons”, where the conversation has itself through its participants, your dialogical partner can be seen not only as like yourself (a fellow subject), but literally as yourself while your being is bound up in the being of dialogue). This happens only where two (or more) are gathered in the spirit of reason to come to an agreeable resolution through dialogue (dia- ‘through’ -logos ‘speech, reason’) rather than appealing to coercive force. As long as disrespect and willingness to coerce is lurking in the background, dialogue cannot happen. Using coercive force against dialogue = anti- + through-logos = antichrist … and so on.

When I think of Judaism as a tradition that 1) under the pressure of its many crises, developed an ever-increasing sensitivity to differences in perspective (particularly across lines of power and powerlessness, being at home and being the homeless, alien other) and 2) learned the enormous importance of intersubjective appeals established by formal law to preserve solidarity (which is of particular importance to the weak and vulnerable) and continuity of their tradition – and then in that light, consider Christ’s message that the telos of the tradition and its law is (or ought to be) the understanding of other human beings as essentially subjects/mind/spirit, I am able to make more immediate and coherent sense of Christianity and of our own culture. To put it in Gadamer’s terms I’m able to appropriate the tradition that has formed me and bring it to conscious life.

One other point of interest you: Bernstein sees American Pragmatism as a key to emerging from postmodern anarchy with our reason intact. I’ve found numerous connections between Nietzsche’s thought and the the ideas of the Pragmatists. It seems that the pragmatic insights were central to the zeitgeist of the mid- to late-19th Century.

…

Email to a friend

Philosophy, Synesis

A friend of mine wrote to me to protest some provocative points from yesterday’s post. The email arrived just as I finished removing precisely those sentences he found objectionable. This is a slightly edited version of my reply:

What’s funny is that I’d just pulled down those parts of my post just as your email arrived because I didn’t want you to read them and to construe them as disrespectful.

What I did here is an unfortunate tendency of mine (which I need to do a better job of tempering if I want to be taken seriously) is to overstate my positions to (over)compensate against unexamined cultural prejudices.

I do believe there is a deep prejudice in our culture to prize whatever originates out of individual genius, and to denigrate what is acquired through conscious learning or unconscious absorption. People are proud of being born with a particular vision of life that has remained with them continuously over the course of their life. More significantly they seem to know that if they voice their pride the culture will affirm it.

Conversely, if a person speaks of constant, deep change, of being influenced again and again, of attempting to reconcile himself with traditions that he admits had a lot to do with his intellectual character (what Gadamer called the appropriation of one’s tradition), that’s not admired. Further, if someone is able to show that an idea you’ve presented is derivative or identical to the thought of another that is not viewed as support for the truth of your insight, but rather almost as a rebuke. At the very least originality points are docked and no other kind of point is awarded.

This kind of value criteria makes listening and learning from those we regard our equals a threat to our individuality, or the purity of our own philosophical accomplishment, or a humiliation. The humiliation of learning deeply from someone with a transcendent view (as opposed to being outfitted with new facts that fit squarely in our existing view) is what is being referred to in the colloquial saying “getting schooled.”

What is shitty about this view and why I am constantly attacking it is that this attitude precludes friendship as I know it and desire it. Dialogue is conversation between friends that leads to common understanding – Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons”, Aristotle’s synesis – and if that common understanding is a philosophical one that common understanding will transcend the earlier vision, and change the participants in the dialogue so deeply that the world itself is transfigured.

My personal pain in a nutshell: Most of the self-consciously spiritual or philosophical people I’ve known appear to me to be too proud to be deeply transformed by a friend, which means they are too proud to be friends at all.

I’ve taken the opposite view and demonstrate and articulate my ideal of non-originality at every opportunity. I am proud to allow an Other to change me and my world. In fact, I rank friendships by how different my world has become as a consequence of the relationship. I am proud of my ability to incorporate other people’s insights, both in my own philosophy but also in my work, to involve and include them. I want all people I love to see themselves in who I’ve become, the thoughts I think, the things I make. I am covered in signature’s signatures. I want to be derivative, unoriginal, common property. I’ve told people at work that I and all my thoughts are public domain: to take whatever they want from me and to not feel obligated to credit me, because anything I have has been stolen.

I have it in for individual originality, individual genius, all that. It is destructive. It has had inflicted real damage to my life. It is what I hate.

Here’s a crucial point: I have yet to see a single soul who subscribes to this common view of things demonstrate the slightest awareness that their whole ideal of individual genius is open to question. They’ve apparently never considered an alternative to it. They seem to be thoroughly blind to any alternative. Or they’ll do that old trick of acknowledging it, in order to keep the concept away from them. It might be real, but it is not involvingly real – not existentially real – and for something whose reality is intrinsically one of involvement mere acknowledgment is tantamount to nullification.

And I hope you also understand that I used to buy into that ideal of individual originality. I don’t do badly under it at all. I generate a lot of what appears to be original concepts. However, the less I buy into the ideal and allow myself to be influenced the more original I appear. I’ve also seen friends grow sterile out of fear of sharing parentage of an insight. (“It has to be ‘mine’ or I don’t want it.” at least in regard to their peers.) They end up just flitting about ostentatiously, trying to appear original while producing nothing original, doing whatever it takes to convince those around them to affirm their autonomy and independence, never noticing that their practice belies their ideal.

I am completely open to the possibility that I am wrong about these matters of philosophical progress (toward the social). If I am wrong, it follows from my own view on these matters that I have to consider – actually more than consider – I have to expect that it’s a wrongness coming from an angle I can’t even anticipate, and would be incredibly unlikely to pursue without some kind of circumstantial pressure. In other words if I am wrong about you it is because I will have to practically transcend my current vision to even see the inadequacy of my vision and know how your vision resolves that inadequacy.

Of course, my kind of pressure does tend to be intersubjective. Intersubjective pain tends to be what turns my attention to questions I once preferred to set aside as “not clean” and to exclude from concern as self-evidently separate and irrelevant. However, if you are sensitive to other kinds of being/realities that go deeper than the intersubjective ones I have been pursuing, that makes them intersubjectively relevant to me anyway since you are my friend.

What we need to do next is discuss how we can discuss this. I am not open to starting with any theory of temperament that encourages “myth of the framework” thinking. If we try to base the discussion on personal inward experiences without any external reference we won’t get anywhere. I’m not denying the reality of temperament or deeply personal experience – only their usefulness in resolving our differences in a synthesis that does justice to both our views but transcends them. (This is very similar to the better objections to creationism. The point is  not that creationism is false, it is simply that creationism is not scientifically discussable.)

The company is the polis

Biography

I’ve finished re-reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I didn’t want to finish it. I’d love to keep reading and stay this state of mind forever.

Here’s the last paragraph of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:

Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach, especially his claim that “man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice,” is a fitting conclusion to this study. We can no longer share Marx’s theoretical certainty or revolutionary self-confidence. There is no guarantee, there is no necessity, no “logic of history” that must inevitably lead to dialogical communities that embrace all of humanity and in which reciprocal judgment, practical discourse, and rational persuasion flourish. If anything, we have or should have learned how much the contemporary world conspires against it and undermines it. And yet it is still a telos, a telos deeply rooted in our human project. As Marx cautions us, it is not sufficient to try to come up with some new variations of arguments that will show, once and for all, what is wrong with objectivism and relativism, or even to open up a way of thinking that can move us beyond objectivism and relativism; such a movement gains “reality and power” only if we dedicate ourselves to the practical task of furthering the type of solidarity, participation, and mutual recognition that is founded in dialogical communities.

*

Re-reading this book has helped me remember why I left my little isolated garden paradise of a thoroughly undemanding non-profit life, where I had the freedom to work on philosophical problems with minimal interference, to return to the commercial world. I came back for genuine dialogical, synetic collaboration. There is nothing in the world more fascinating, precious and rare than dialogue, authentic community, real intersubjective absorption in shared problems.

One of my nutty beliefs: In our time the company is the polis. The commercial world is our ecumene. So then: What governs the life of a company? What is its power structure? What are its principles? Is a company necessarily a pure plutocracy? Is democracy possible? If so, what are the tradoffs? What guides a company’s business practice? Pure business techne? Phronsis? Synesis? How does a power structure preserve itself in its practices and its principles?

*

Business is a huge practical-philosophical laboratory. Every project is a political petri dish.

Dialogical community

Philosophy

A very inspiring passage from Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:

Each of these thinkers [Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty and Arendt] points, in different ways, to the conclusion that the shared understandings and experience, intersubjective practices, sense of affinity, solidarity, and those tacit affective ties that bind individuals together into a community must already exist. A community or a polis is not something that can be made or engineered by some form of techne or by the administration of society. There is something of a circle here, comparable to the hermeneutical circle. The coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and to listen, mutual debate, and a commitment to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life.

But what, then, is to be done in a situation in which there is a breakdown of such communities, and where the very conditions of social life have the consequences of furthering such a breakdown? More poignantly, what is to be done when we realize how much of humanity has been systematically excluded and prevented from participating in such dialogical communities?

We know what has been a typical modern response to this situation: the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form such communities. But this is precisely what cannot be done, and the attempts to do so have been disastrous. Such failures occur when we restrict ourselves to the horizon of technical reason, to the mentality of fabrication, or confine ourselves to the perspective of purposive-rational action.

. . .

But where does this leave us today in confronting our historical situation? I think Habermas is right when he declares that our situation is one in which “both revolutionary self-confidence and theoretical self-certainty are gone.” But like Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt, I want to stress the danger of the type of “totalizing” critique that seduces us into thinking that the forces at work in contemporary society are so powerful and devious that there is no possibility of achieving a communal life based on undistorted communication, dialogue, communal judgment, and rational persuasion. What we desperately need today is to learn to think and act more like the fox than the hedgehog — to seize upon those experiences and struggles in which there are still the glimmerings of solidarity and the promise of dialogical communities in which there can be genuine mutual participation and where reciprocal wooing and persuasion can prevail. For what is characteristic of our contemporary situation is not just the playing out of powerful forces that are always beyond our control, or the spread of disciplinary techniques that always elude our grasp, but a paradoxical situation where power creates counter-power (resistance) and reveals the vulnerability of power, where the very forces that undermine and inhibit communal life also create new, and frequently unpredictable, forms of solidarity.

 

Across words

Etymology

Dialogue – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French dialoge, via Latin from Greek dialogos, from dialegesthai ‘converse with,’ from dia ‘through, across’ + legein ‘speak.’

Dialectic – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French dialectique or Latin dialectica, from Greek dialektike (tekhne) ‘(art) of debate,’ from dialegesthai ‘converse with’. [NOTE: dialogical techne?]

Transcend – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French transcendre or Latin transcendere, from trans– ‘across’ + scandere ‘climb.’


Games

Philosophy

I love the game I win. It’s all about the rules matching one’s strengths.

The winner defends the rules. The loser wants to change the rules.

The game of philosophy is the game of games, the game of rules.

Philosophy is for losers.

Christian cred

Etymology, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Symbols and diagrams, Synesis, Taoism

Think about these statements:

“Bear with me.”
“Please hear me out.”
“It will all make sense in the end.”

Why are these requests necessary? When are they made?

To what feeling in the listener is the speaker responding?

What kind of appeal is being made? Do we owe it to another to give him a full hearing?

When is the appeal denied? Is it a matter of credibility?

What is the experience of denial?

*

To read the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament is to experience the most pluralistic religious vision ever recorded, from the most accutely and radically pluralistic people who ever lived. In what other scripture is the same story is recounted three different times from the point of view of three different people? It would have been easier and more obvious to collapse them into one univocal account, but instead the three experiences, three meaningful visions were presented together in a three-in-one synopsis – syn– (together) –opsis (seeing). [* See note 1 below]

I like to think of pluralism as a kind of parallax vision, that allows us to see hyper-dimensionally. With one eye you see a flat picture. With two eyes working in concert we see depth. Our so-called “inner eye” draws out the dimension of meaning. With a pluralistic synopsis we see meaning together – we share meaning and have community. We gain understanding, which the Greeks called synesis.

*

By the time Jesus began teaching his distinctively Jewish universal vision of life, the Jewish tradition had survived and overcome numerous cultural crises. They had dominated and been subjugated, had won their home and lost it. They knew belonging and alienation, and they knew both sides of power.

Most importantly they knew that knowledge of experience means to know an experience from the inside. Experiencing is inseparable from that which is experienced, and this means, to use a common visual analogy, that  experience is inseparable from its vision, as how the world looks from that experience. (One of my favorite Jewish thinkers, Edmund Husserl called this “intentionality”: seeing and seen are inseparable, as are hearing and sound, feeling and sensation, etc. [* See note 2 below].)

The Jews knew better than anyone that power is something that can be seen, but even more, it is a way of seeing – of life and the world as a whole. Power has its own kind of vision. When an emperor sees himself, or his court, or a rival power, or he looks upon a conquered enemy or slave, that emperor sees something radically different than the slave regarding the same situation. Power is something different, powerlessness is different. A palace, a body, a tree, a poem… everything is the same in a sense, but things are deeply different. The same goes for a stranger, expat, wanderer, outcast or outcaste.

Out of necessity, the Jews had to develop a way of preserving themselves as a tradition within these conditions. That meant living on a line between provoking attacks from the outside and simply dissolving from cultural self-indifference or self-disgust. They had to internalize their strength. They had to find dignity in their vulnerability to escape the indignity of weakness.

There was no way such a response to such a universal problem was going to stay contained within a small ethnic tradition forever. Whether it was Jesus or Paul, somehow the radical insights of Judaism went universal.

*

A series of words derived from the Latin word credere, “believe, trust”:

  • Credit
  • Credential
  • Credence
  • Creed
  • Credo

A series of words derived from the Old English word agan, “believe, trust.” :

  • Own
  • Owe
  • Ought (originally past tense of “owe”)

A series of words derived from Latin auditor, from audire, “to hear”:

  • Audit
  • Audition
  • Auditorium
  • Auditory
  • Audio

*

An example of divergent accounts from two of the Synoptic Gospels (which some scholars believe were adapted from yet another lost Gospel, “Q”, possibly a compendium of sayings similar to the (in)famous Gospel of Thomas).

These two passages are taken from Jesus’s famous Lord’s Prayer, his instructions on how to pray.

Matthew 6:12: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Luke 11:4: “And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”

In Matthew 6:12, the Greek word used was opheilema. [* See note 3 below.]

In Luke 11:4, the Greek word was hamartia, which means literally “missing the mark”.

*

Out of time. Darn. I’ll finish this post if there’s any interest. [* See note 4 below.]

—-

* NOTE 1:  To call the New Testament inconsistent as some atheists do is to miss the point. To argue over which meaning is the right meaning as the fundamentalists do is to betray the point. To behave as though a plurality of possible meaning implies that all meanings are equivalent and that it is meaningless to discuss them… to go skeptical on that basis, and to ask cynically, rhetorically “what is truth?”… to wash one’s hands of the responsibility to engage dialogically in pursuit of understanding… that’s complicity in the conflict.

* NOTE 2:  Intentionality in Husserl’s sense is a core religious insight, expressed in a variety of forms, from the Jewish Star of David, to the Chinese yin-within-yang and yang-within-yin, to the Greek Janusian herms (with Hermes’s head fused to the head of a goddess, often Aphrodite), to the Hermetic hermaphroditic Androgyne, male on the right, female on the left, sun on the right, moon on the left. Listen for the inside-outside symbolic structure and you’ll find it everywhere. This capacity to hear and understand the form-language of symbol is what I believe is meant by “having ears that hear.”

* NOTE 3: Opheilema seemed like it might have a connection with the name “Ophelia” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if there was an etymological connection. According to Wikipedia, “the name ‘Ophelia’ itself was either uncommon or nonexistent; the only known prior text to use the name (as “Ofalia”) is Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia.” It seems fairly obvious the name is a combination of opheilema and philia, love – “love debt” – love unrequited.)

* NOTE 4: Etymology of “interest”: ORIGIN 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.’ Also influenced by medieval Latin interesse ‘compensation for a debtor’s defaulting.’