All posts by anomalogue

Practice precedes theory

Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Practice precedes theory. Practice is wordlessly active. Theory is the verbal ensurfacing of practice.

Hermeneutics is the practice of performing the ensurfacing practice in reverse  (most obvious when performed in the intellectual realm). It is the reconsititution of wordless intellectual practice guided by the theoretical content, treated as artifact, but not as the essential content of the writing.

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I read Nietzsche hermeneutically, but it took me nearly four years to explain how reading Nietzsche was unlike other kinds of reading. It took me all this time to find the descriptive language for a practice I’d already mastered, but mastered mutely.

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Genuine philosophy is not factual: philosophy presents its factual content like a starry sky, by which the reader/listener can navigate his understanding. The navigating is the essential philosophical act. But most people look at the star-charts and confuse navigation with astronomy.

You cannot summarize philosophy. You cannot factually transfer it. Philosophy is not reflections, it is reflecting. Philosophy must be coperformed, or it degrades into mere fact.

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What has made Nietzsche such a controversial and perpetually fascinating writer is this: much of his content is strictly artifact, often the opposite of his own private opinions. He leaves it to the reader to apply the intellectual practices he teaches; it is up to the reader to apply this practice to his own content and to reach his own conclusions. And he assumes his reader will need to reach his own conclusions because precisely the readers Nietzsche wants (of whom and to whom he wrote frequently) will find the content of Nietzsche’s apparent philosophy, his factual philosophy, completely unacceptable, offensive. But you have to stay with him, anyway, all the way to the ugly end. If you try to cut to the conclusions, you will miss everything.

Nietzsche’s ideal reader – out of the deep, intense urgency – will apply Nietzsche’s practical philosophy to the goal of escaping Nietzsche’s factual philosophy – to the refuge of his own conclusions. And just when you think you disagree with him, Nietzsche winks mischeviously and compassionately.

Remember: Nietzsche called himself the first Dionysian philosopher. Dionysus/Siva: the dancing god.

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The consciousness of appearance. — How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-a-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer, — I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a sleepwalker must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is “appearance” for me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence,–what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown X or remove from it! Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more, — that among all these dreamers, I, too, the “knower,” am dancing my dance, that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve — the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.

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I would only believe in a God who could dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we kill. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need to be pushed to move from a spot.

Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. —

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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Spoiler: Dionysus is wordless practice, dance doing its dance. Apollo is theory and everything else that belongs to surface. Dionysian philosophy is doing, faithfully, what philosophical urgency (not curiosity or ambition) impels one to do. Only afterward – as  consummation – the accomplishment, which is known only in hindsight, is articulated. This is Nietzsche’s “overcoming“.

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This might be a pretty good scholarly paper.

Pragmatist inkling?

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’m beginning to suspect praxis is knowledge viewed from the inside… the essential counterpart to what is apparent when knowledge self-reflects or presents itself as knowledge. Consider this possible developmental process: 1) knowledge begins as an instinctive response to a novel situation, 2a) then the response is iterated and refined within the same and similar situations, 2b) and the refined response is demonstrated and imitated between subjects who participate in the interation and refinement process, 3) then the response is reflectively stabilized through analogies and models, and becomes a verbally communicable practice then finally 4) vocabulary is developed for the practice.

I’m sure I’ll see this in Rorty once I start him, because practically I began thinking like a pragmatist back in 2005, when I had to imitate Bernstein’s manner of thinking in order to follow him (learned the steps of his intellectual dance). That is the only way to understand philosophy as such. Since then I’ve applied Bernstein’s ideas and style to many problems – including design problems and political problems I’ve encountered at work. I’ve also found that same style of thought in Wittgenstein and the smattering of pragmatist thought I’ve read. Now I am interested in learning the vocabulary and the ethics of the pragmatist community.

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I’ve worked intensely and uninterruptedly for 40 months, to be able to say this (relatively) clearly: Hermeneutics is spiritual pragmatism. By spirit, I mean the intellect, but not the intellect that is the mental dimension of an essentially corporeal reality. Spirit is intellect acknowledged as the ground of reality.

Reading hermeneutically is navigating the author’s subjectivity by the objects of his inquiries. The real goal of hermeneutics is not to acquire facts, nor even to uncover the structure by which the author orders his factual reality, but rather to learn to think with the author through his work, and eventually to be able to approach problems as the author would approach them. Such practical knowledge cannot be transferred mind-to-mind across the membrane of individual subjectivities as reflective theoretical knowledge can. It requires gradual merging of wills, until one’s intellectual movements spontaneously mirror or at least play off the movements of the other, and understanding flows in without sharp anomalies or blurry romantic notions.

Hermeneutics is intellectual dance; it is spiritual pragmatism; and it is trans-subjective transcendental phenomenology. It all takes place in the borders between whole and part, mastery and tentative participation, insidedness and outsidedness, in knowing how to know when you do not yet know, and knowing the kinds of knowing one might have or not yet expect.

I set out to account for what it was exactly that Nietzsche did to me. He taught me the dance of dances.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation

Hermeneutics

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a poetic demonstration of Gadamerian historicity. It is a self-interpretive narrative experienced from the inside, degrading retroactively as it unfolds into the future, always faithful to the truth of the utter faithlessness of memory. The content of memory might be the past, but its sole allegiance is to the future.

Kaufman is the best philosophical filmmaker I know of. He seems gimmicky because his urgency is rare, and his ingenuity is distracting.

Intelligence and urgency

Philosophy

I like this Aldous Huxley quote: “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

Does that mean that a Huxley-qualified intellectual who thinks sex is infinitely interesting is in some sense superior to one who never saw why sex was such a big deal?

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Intelligence is one important element of intellectuality, but urgency is also important. Intelligence and urgency increase one another’s effect exponentially, and sometimes catastrophically. The poor souls who are both urgent and intelligent to an extreme drive way the hell too far out into the frontiers of knowledge and create great caches of insight where nobody has ever been, then they die in solitude. They literally sacrifice themselves to knowledge.

The sacrifice is redeemed by the merely intelligent and the merely urgent. The merely intelligent build infrastructure around the new knowledge – sanitation (solid scholarship), communications (standard language, histories, textbook knowledge), logistics (publishing, championing). The merely urgent digest all these insights, simplify them, smooth them and carry them back to civilization. The merely urgent are the agents of popular change.

I can tell you: there is a lot out of astonishing insight out there, freely available, that civilization has not even begun to digest. The question is whether we’ll eat, or whether we’ll keep pointing at our empty distended bellies as proof that we’re already too full. We’re starving to death on a mountain of nourishment.

Skepticism

Fables, myths & parables

Skepticism is the practice by which a thinker interrogates obviousness, givenness and assumedness until everything he “knows” falls apart in his hands. What can be done with the broken pieces of former truth?

For one kind of thinker the pieces become an exhibit of the nonexistence of truth. He breaks pieces into smaller pieces to renew his faith in factlessness, a willful refusal to know any particular thing as true. For another kind of thinker the pieces are disillusionment. He glues them back together into a recollection of the past, and makes skepticism taboo, and this is his faith, a willful commitment to know particular things as true. (For both truth is conceived as constituted of particular true knowledge.)

There is a third option. Actively do the breaking, but pause regularly and allow the pieces to reconstitute themselves. Observe as a gentle scientist, walking around like a sculptor – within, without and upon – the fluidly rearticulating shapes, noting everything, omitting nothing. Especially note the feeling of ethical freedom and ethical rebinding, and the influence of others.

David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College, again

Fables, myths & parables

I think maybe Wallace wasn’t really giving advice to those graduating students in that commencement address. It seems possible that he was pleading for mercy: “You might not understand specifically why I am how I am, but please allow your misunderstanding to be a compassionate story…”

Maybe philosophy is nothing other than a practical, factical attempt to make the fragile people at home in this world with us. We can make the world tough and habitable only for the tough… but then we will be surrounded by tough people and we might wonder why the world is so dull and flat and devoid of possibility. The best beauty is delicate. Enlightened strength is moved by fragility and sacrifices to it.

(By the way, do women understand that if they gain ascendancy in the world, men will become the beautiful ones? Women will have to learn the art of human connoisseurship. Until then they will be insufferable tyrants. Look at the ERA parades, and look at the average modern wife: Hell on Earth. This transition to female dominance has sucked and will continue to suck until it resolves and women know how to love from a position of strength.)

Spiritual anatomy lesson

Fables, myths & parables

(A semi-poeticization of Husserl)

It is too easy to confuse our biological anatomy with our spiritual anatomy, to confuse the physical site in the body where the spiritual intercepts kinesis (the body experienced from the inside). Our minds are accustomed to reflect on a world of particulars and objects, and spiritual entities defy comprehension in this mode of thought. (But not all modes of thought. I’m not a mystic or a romantic. Many apparently unthinkable things can be thought, if thought in the appropriate mode.)

The two major points of confusion: 1) the equation of spiritual mind (in German ‘geist‘ means both spirit and mind, and most of our religious notions come directly out of German meditations on geist) with the biological brain; 2) the equation of spiritual heart with the biological heart.

The spiritual mind is actually the negative space of the brain. The spiritual mind has the shape of the entire universe, inner and outer, and it orbits each of us, and leaps from each of us and dives back in like solar flares. It can also be viewed as a field of vision within which sights exist. The spiritual mind does not displace space like an object. In fact it barely exists except for where it cooccupies an Other’s mind and becomes transcendent We: a seeing-with-together.

The spiritual heart – the heart who breaks – only intercepts the site of the physical heart. It extends throughout the entire body, and then out into the world in twisting tendrils. That spiritual heart, like spiritual mind, displaces nothing, but barely exists except in cooccupation with an Other’s heart and becomes another dimension of transcendent We, a feeling-with-together.

When a heart is broken, one of these tendrils is severed, and taken off by an Other. The brokenness is the phantom limb of the heart-tendril, which continues to feel and ache. It cannot be rejoined; it cannot be touched and comforted.

It is dangerous to love authentically. Most of us refuse to be with an Other – another subject-as-such, another entire interlapping universe. We’d rather interstimulate with another across the membrane of space: a subject-thing we regard whole against the sky, a psychological thing-soul encapsulated in a skull and a chest.

It is dangerous to love, but love anyway. Do it again and again even if it kills you.

The world is not out there. It isn’t “within” you, either. It exists between us. (The physical world exists for us as a subset of the spiritual. When mystics speak of the illusory nature of the world, what they mean, or what they ought to mean, is that the physical world’s primacy as the metaphysical substance of the world is illusory. It is all made of spirit.)

We are all we have. We are all we want.

The luxury of skepticism

Fables, myths & parables

Once you’ve fully exercised your skepticism and called the contents of common sense into such doubt that common sense seems no better grounded than any other solidly constructed poetic vision you might find yourself tempted to experiment. If you’ve been able to walk on this surface for all this time without falling beneath, what other unlikely surfaces will hold you up?

However, standing in the boat and looking out on the water and speculating how it might bear your weight, trying all sorts of possible explanations and theories (does God solidify the water under each foot like a tiny boat? Does he hold you up by the scruff of your soul? Maybe there’s a sandbar under there? Maybe the water is frozen?) – that is not exercising skepticism. Exercising skepticism is testing the possibilities in ordinary day-to-day practice. I’m tasteless enough to call rational resolve’s practical follow-through “faith”.

The most fascinating knowledge in the world

Philosophy

I’ve put considerable effort into learning the most fascinating things in the whole world. Therefore, by my own standards I know the most fascinating things in the world, and being someone who prizes knowledge, I have made myself into my own ideal of the most fascinating person in the world. It’s too bad these standards are strictly my own. Dang. (But there’s an upside: because knowledge isn’t treasured it’s inexpensive. I can buy miraculously good books for ludicrously low prices. This book I’m reading right now ought to cost more than a house, but I got it for $20, brand-new.) Still, I’d love to meet someone who recognizes the value of the insights I’ve worked for and fought for. I feel like I’ve accumulated zillions of dollars in a currency nobody exchanges.

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Maybe it would be fruitful to ask some questions about what makes my fascinating knowledge so fascinating. Is the knowledge itself fascinating? Are the applications of the knowledge fascinating, as case studies? Does the knowledge itself only become fascinating as it is being applied, so that the conjoining of theory and practice is what is fascinating? Or is the activity of applying the knowledge the locus of the fascination – and if it is fascinating as an activity, is it a participatory or spectatorly fascination? Or is the fascination bound up with the entity acted upon in the application of the knowledge? Or is it being, oneself, the object of the application, being acted upon, affected? Maybe it’s a matter of presentation or packaging.

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I asked myself a question five years ago: If I discovered there were no practical purpose at all in my learning and thinking, would I do it anyway? My answer was “yes”. I need to keep it that way. And I need to protect my life as a means to do this learning and thinking. Because when I ask that same question about just about everything else my answer is “no”. That “yes” and that “no” is one’s ethical kernel.

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Love is what we do for no reason.

Once you are clear on what in your life is ends and what is means you can be a real son-of-a-bitch.

Maybe my existence in regard to all other people is absolutely purposeless. Then what? What do we owe one another?

Marys and Marthas

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism

As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

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Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

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We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

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I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

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There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

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How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

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Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?

New brand

Biography, Brand

A premise for a book: 1) Brand theory is evolving, because brand itself is evolving. We are not deepening our understanding of something constant. We are reflecting on something that is rapidly evolving and our thinking reflects the change: the relationship between customers and companies in a cultural environment centered with increasing exclusivity on production and consumption of salable goods and service. There is no time and even less energy for anything but this, and we humans, the spiritually insuppressible and resilient beings we are, learn to love and humanize what we are unable or unwilling to escape. 2) This new kind of brand relationship originated in the relationship between fans and their bands that existed in the proto-alternative music of the 80s and early 90s, and came to prominence as gen-x became more influential in the market as producers and consumers. The new brands owe more to the Pixies and Pavement than to Tide and Geritol. The old brands were mere functional promises. The new brands are more richly dimensional and help support personal and social identity.

Not by choice

Biography, Brand

Our heroes, who move us in paradoxical awe and pity, have never chosen this way of being.

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When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the misfit kids were indignant when their bands were adopted by the mainstream. I think it was like this: the mainstream could have chosen otherwise – it just helped itself to something novel that happened to be there. The mainstream would equate its consumption of yet another variety of entertainment with our need for what we experienced as art, as a rare and precious sense of belonging.

I think when we pulled that move of dismissing an artist’s later work (“That first album was great, but…”), we were attempting to preserve a brand relationship. We severed our relationship with the band as it exists in the present – and even with the band’s past work as it is discovered in the present. The new brand relationship was having been there at the time it was happening: having the right to enjoy the band nostalgically. We learned how to do this, and did it repeatedly, constantly, as our desperate alternative to an unacceptable existence became the consumer category Alternative Music.

Then we became ashamed of hanging our identities on bands at all. Sonic Youth decided to like Madonna and hip hop, and that seemed like a good way to go. We tried to like sports, and we wore baseball caps. We looked for guilty pleasures that could democratize us a little. We loosened our grips, opened our hands, went out into the market…

What is truth?

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Some ways truth is established, practically:

  • In representing the contents of life in a clear, orderly and self-evident way. Truth = tidiness.
  • In accurately anticipating and influencing the future. Truth = security.
  • In bringing fragmentary facts home to a unified body of understanding. Truth = digestion.
  • In reaching agreements with those around you. Truth = home.

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On that last point, truth as home: Young philosophers love to believe they don’t need a home, that they don’t need to share truth.

Fact is, the philosopher needs to share his truth more than any other kind of person. Sharing truth is the philosopher’s job.

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The youthful philosopher (who seeks truth) is larval, just fry. He is aware only that he cannot share the prevalent truth. This is his point of departure. He heads off toward an oasis – his truth – he sees hovering on the edge of the horizon. He dreams of sitting at the side of his own pool, reflecting in solitude to his heart’s content. He drives at his truth, driven by idiotic instinct, just like a salmon drawn back to the head of the stream where he was born. Does he reach his truth? Yes, but not the truth he thought he’d find. He doesn’t find any oasis, but he certainly finds himself submerged in something cold and disturbingly fluid, and it can be summarized as something like: “My God, I don’t want to be alone here.”

Look for this form, and you’ll see it again and again. Wittgenstein slowly losing his mind alone in his house high on a cliff above Norwegian fjords; Nietzsche (who called his philosophical kind “hyperboreans”) living alone in Sils Maria; Christopher McCandless hitchiking to Alaska and dying there; and so on.

Anyone who goes out into true solitude and comes back knows three things for certain: 1) physical sustenance is nowhere near sufficient; 2) the power to coerce is the opposite of what is needed; 3) religion is not about magical miracles, but something more radically surprising.

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It doesn’t matter how tough or antisocial a human being is. A person in solitary confinement goes insane.

A philosopher who thinks too far can fall into plain-sight solitary confinement. He can speak with others, but he cannot make himself heard and he cannot digest most kinds of company.

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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

– Rumi