All posts by anomalogue

Merleau-Ponty on possibility

Philosophy

I got a massive jolt of happiness reading the passage below. Bolds are mine.

Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely proportioned to the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own results with reified form in the world. The philosopher tries to conceive the world, others and himself and their interrelations. But the meditating Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’ do not rediscover an already given rationality, they ‘establish themselves’, and establish it, by an act of initiative which has no guarantee in being, its justification resting entirely on the effective power which it confers on us of taking our own history upon ourselves.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this creation is possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it. Rationality is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quantity which has to be determined by deduction, or, beginning with it, demonstrated inductively. We witness every minute the miracle of related experience, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some ‘solution’, it is on the hither side of all solutions. True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we stake our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act which is validated by being performed.

I especially enjoyed this: “the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it.”

This brought to mind a quote from Robert F. Kennedy, which is supposed to be inspiring, but which I find alarming:

“You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”

Anyone who has worked in the design field as long as I have will recognize this attitude. It is the attitude of dudes who still haven’t quite internalized the non-deducibility of reality from one’s brilliant ideas and current understanding of truth. It is the omniscience of the inexperienced who still believe that if they cannot see how something is wrong, that can be taken as evidence that it is right. Or if they can’t understand the reason why someone thinks or acts in some particular way, that means the thought or action is unreasonable.

And naive logic monsters of this kind, if their deductions want you to logically prove to them to their satisfaction that their thinking is wrong — which, of course, is not possible. To them, this proves that you have no point and that they are right. And they believe that your irritation with their insularity is a symptom that, on some level, you kind of know they are right, but just can’t bring yourself to admit it. Perhaps you lack the courage or imagination of a Kennedy.

…anyway, I wanted to be sure I got the RFK quote right, and looking for the original, I found this page, which provided me my second jolt of happiness:

AUTHOR: George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

QUOTATION: You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”

ATTRIBUTION: George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, act I, Selected Plays with Prefaces, vol. 2, p. 7 (1949). The serpent says these words to Eve.

President John F. Kennedy quoted these words in his address to the Irish Parliament, Dublin, June 28, 1963. — Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 537.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy used a similar quotation as a theme of his 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.” Senator Edward M. Kennedy quoted these words of Robert Kennedy’s in his eulogy for his brother in 1968. — The New York Times, June 9, 1968, p. 56.

Transformability of givenness

Enworldment

Givenness is the spontaneous, pre-reflective experiencing of something as something.

We tend to think of givens as foundational points of departure. However, as history testifies, at least some givens can be changed, to potentially profound effect. The effect of such changes is inconceivable prior to the change, because the scope of conceivability itself is what changes.

I believe that some givens ought to be changed, that other givens ought not to be changed (but cultivated, protected and bequeathed), and that some givens, maybe most, ought to evolve organically. But we must ask some crucial questions: Who decides, for whom? and by what reasoning is this decision made? and by what means may givens be changed? Finally, how is the transformation of givens experienced by one undergoing the change and how does one understand the transformation, when that by which understanding happens is precisely what is transforming?

(This is me experimenting with approaching my incipient book Enworldment from the angle of transformability of givenness.)

Buber on misapotheosis

Existentialism, Judaism, Taoism

Martin Buber, in his Introduction to Pointing the Way makes an extremely important distinction between two forms of religiosity:

In this selection of my essays from the years 1909 to 1954, I have, with one exception, included only those that, in the main, I can also stand behind today.

The one exception is ‘The Teaching of the Tao,’ the treatise which introduced my 1909 translation of selected Talks and Parables of Chuang-tzu. I have included this essay because, in connection with the development of my thought, it seems to me too important to be withheld from the reader in this collection. But I ask him while reading it to bear in mind that this small work belongs to a stage that I had to pass through before I could enter into an independent relationship with being. One may call it the ‘mystical’ phase if one understands as mystic the belief in a unification of the self with the all-self, attainable by man in levels or intervals of his earthly life. Underlying this belief, when it appears in its true form, is usually a genuine ‘ecstatic’ experience. But it is the experience of an exclusive and all-absorbing unity of his own self. This self is then so uniquely manifest, and it appears then so uniquely existent, that the individual loses the knowledge, ‘This is my self, distinguished and separate from every other self’. He loses the sure knowledge of the principium individuationis, and understands this precious experience of his unity as the experience of the unity.

When this man returns into life in the world and with the world, he is naturally inclined from then on to regard everyday life as an obscuring of the true life. Instead of bringing into unity his whole existence as he lives it day by day, from the hours of blissful exaltation unto those of hardship and of sickness, instead of living this existence as unity, he constantly flees from it into the experience of unity, into the detached feeling of unity of being, elevated above life. But he thereby turns away from his existence as a man, the existence into which he has been set, through conception and birth, for life and death in this unique personal form. Now he no longer stands in the dual basic attitude that is destined to him as a man: carrying being in his person, wishing to complete it, and ever again going forth to meet worldly and above-worldly being over against him, wishing to be a helper to it. Rather in the ‘lower’ periods he regards everything as preparation for the ‘higher.’ But in these ‘higher hours’ he no longer knows anything over against him: the great dialogue between I and Thou is silent; nothing else exists than his self, which he experiences as the self. That is certainly an exalted form of being untrue but it is still being untrue. Being true to the being in which and before which I am placed is the one thing that is needful.

I recognized this and what follows from it five years after setting down this small work. It took another five years for this recognition to ripen to expression. The readers for whom I hope are those who see my way as one, parallel to their own way towards true existence.

I’ve called the confusion of the unified self with the All-Self misapotheosis.

I do not believe that Taoism is a religion of misapotheosis, but I do think that the shift from an ecliptic mode of existence to an authentically existential one does lead one through a “soliptic” mode — an philosophically-induced autism — that frees a soul from onerous conceptual obligations and liberates it to reconceive existence in a more spontaneously intuitive mode.

This soliptic state produces so much pleasure it tempts a soul to a life of permanent alienated bliss, defended by an attitude of “contemptus mundi” toward whatever threatens to re-obligate it. Many spiritual people are imprisoned by this liberation and never escape it.

Knowing from a distance

Design, Existentialism

My life as a design researcher goes like this, over and over: My client hires us to do design research. The organization is full of smart people who know the organization’s business inside and out. They believe they know roughly what is happening with their customers and their employees. Mostly they just want us to fill in some knowledge gaps. So we go out and interact with real people in their homes and workplaces. There we learn that the situation is quite different from what the client thought, that the problem has been misframed, and that the most important insights aren’t located in the knowledge gaps, but rather where nobody thought to look.

It’s not like this every time. Some organizations understand people better than others. But it is like this often enough that I am highly skeptical of claims to know from a distance. It is hard enough even to know close-up!

And when people seem unaware of the difficulties of distant knowledge and have too much confidence in their ability to piece things together based on sifting hearsay, I suspect they lack the kind of healthy relationship with reality that allows us to know truth.

Rational madness

Philosophy

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” — Nietzsche

*

It is fairly easy to produce a coherent explanation of everything if we are willing to selectively ignore our experiences or disregard them as epiphenomenal — as caused by physical or societal processes.

If we try to do full justice to our most immediate experiences — and take seriously things like love, beauty, sacrality, relevance, intuition, offense, admiration, ambivalence, loneliness, jealousy, alienation, togetherness, shame, anxiety, perplexity — we find ourselves facing a harder problem.

And if we take seriously other persons’ accounts of their immediate experiences, and resist the compulsion to ignore or disregard what they experience, the quest for coherent explanation might even seem like a distraction from actually understanding what is going on around us.

*

Another Nietzsche quote: “The two principles of the new life. — First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon. Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.”

When attempting to understand the world, far too many people rely too much on secondary accounts of distant events — and on what they, with their limited life experiences, can construe from these accounts. Much can go wrong with interpretations. Misinterpretive wrongness compounds when misinterpretations are subjected to theories untempered by praxis (that is, through iterative application, reflection and correction.)

And then, of course, there is the question of selection of accounts. Which are noticed as relevant, and taken seriously as something to accept or reject? Which accounts are never seen or sought or slip by as irrelevant noise? The selected accounts tend to be those that play nice with existing interpretive schemes and one’s own active theories.

And of course, each account is the result of a similar selection and construal process. Who are they paying attention to?

What this over-reliance on secondary accounts does to a public — a public which spends more time processing other people’s processing of other people’s processing — is alienating them from their own immediacy — and exchanging that personal immediacy for obsessive-compulsive theorizing on distant matters. This process produces tribal mass minds.

A person caught up in a mass mind will “think independently” — will rigorously ratiocinate using the interpretive schema and theories of a tribe — and reach the conclusions all reasonable people must.

*

My response to politics is based on my immediate experience of what ideologies do to those possessed by them.

Does an ideology’s interpretive schema and social theory justify coercion or violence to meet its goals? Does it seek and find exigencies that justify illiberal measures? If so, that ideology is potentially violent and illiberal. I do not have to calculate probable events to know this.

Does a popular ideology eclipse the possibility of genuine personal connection? Does it dismiss or explain away immediate experience? or does it reduce persons to categories with deducible properties? or does its judgment justify prioritizing its own judgment over my own? or does it obsessive-compulsively drive conversation back to distant matters? If so, I resent it for body-snatching people who might otherwise be friends.

*

“But what if I’m right? Then what?” “What if this conspiracy is real?” “What if your apparent agency is just an emergent property of unjust social dynamics?” “What if the devil is deluding you and preventing you from joining our church?” “What if?” —

Well… What if you are trying to talk me out of trusting my own immediate experience so you can seduce me to an intellectual circularity that will rob me of personal agency?

That rings true.

Vehemence

Philosophy

One of my favorite moods is something I’ve called “vehemence”.

I just looked up the etymology, and now I like it even more. Vehemence means “forcefulness, violence, rashness”. For me, it means getting carried away by my own intuitive force.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

vehemence (n.)

c. 1400, from Old French vehemence, veemence “forcefulness, violence, rashness” or directly from Latin vehementia “eagerness, strength,” from stem of vehere “to carry” (from PIE root *wegh- “to go, move, transport in a vehicle”).

Entries linking to vehemence: wegh- Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to go, move, transport in a vehicle.”

The root wegh-, “to convey, especially by wheeled vehicle,” is found in virtually every branch of Indo-European, including now Anatolian. The root, as well as other widely represented roots such as aks– and nobh-, attests to the presence of the wheel — and vehicles using it — at the time Proto-Indo-European was spoken.

Merriam-Webster adds an alternative account:

NOTE: Alternatively explained as a prefix v?– “faulty, excessive or deficient” and ment-, mens “mind,” in which case –ehe– is an unetymological spelling of the long vowel. Though this would account for vehemens in place of *vehimens (with normal vowel weakening), the word never has the sense “mentally deranged” (the meanings of the presumed parallel formations vecors and vesanus).

I creatively (mis)interpret this as a sort of faith in my pre-knowing gut to produce just the right fury-inspired thoughts and words and actions, without any need for conscious reflection.

*

But the most important thing about vehemence is that this is a happy anger at exactly those things that in weaker moments reduce me to bitter impotence.

From vehemence, I feel comic contempt for people who try so hard to believe unbelievable beliefs, adopt the ugly linguistic habits and perform the tortured etiquette of mass-minded tribalists.

I’m simpy not participating — not with it — but also not against it, because the antis are just a different variety of dangerously dumb.

It’s all incredibly dumb, and the tragic violence to come will just make it dumber, though the violence itself will probably throw some sublime sparks here and there. Mostly it will be a sea of bloody, muddy stupidity.

*

At least today, so far, I’m vehemently outside the nonsense.

I want to live here.

Promises of new worlds

Enworldment

For an enworldment to become culturally relevant, its praxis must not only be good from the inside but it must also be compelling (beautiful, sublime, fascinating) from the outside.

“Inside”: for those who understand and participate in the enworldment, existence becomes manifestly good.

“Outside”: for those who experience only the enworldment’s manifestations — its words, deeds and expressions — it hovers between comprehension and bafflement in that range of semi-understanding we experience as mystery.

*

Mystery suggests potential but unrealized intelligibility.

The potency of mystery is a function of the actuality of the enworldment that generates its appearance. If one manages to “get inside” the aesthetic, a new enworldment will spontaneously resolve itself. A new understanding — a new stance — a new priority — a new way emerges — and everything is now different in the most important sense, though most things stay mostly the same. It is the precise opposite of magic, though it is inconceivably magical.

False mysteriousness — a vice of artistic and religious charlatans — tries to use mystery effects to suggest an enworldment that will never spontaneously resolve — will never become second-natural — at any degree of understanding or familiarity with the mystifying words, ways or artifacts.

*

And then there’s technik.

Technik assures us that it is possible, through great combinatory effort, that we might find an order that will gives each sundry part — including you and me — a place in the system. Alienation will end. Clarity will reign. And this all-embracing outer technik is our only hope for inner peace. This is the promise of positivist thought and art.

Technik’s plan is to willfully permute our way to an artificial paradise we will learn to love.

Reenworld thyself

Enworldment

Let’s stop distorting the meaning of subjectivity by situating it within an essentially objective world.

But that objective world within which we understand ourselves to be situated is produced by our subjectivity, through its own participation in reality.

It is reality within which we are situated. Objectivity (and the objective truth we know about it) is merely what we instaurate — discover-create — through this participation in reality.

To confuse reality with objective truth — and nearly everyone does this to some degree — is to succumb to misapotheosis: the confusion ourselves and our objective comprehension of truth, with God and God’s own comprehension of reality within Godself. We are a mere image of God, a finite incarnation of infinite more-than-being.

*

The objective truth we can talk about is a tiny subset of the objective truth we experience; the objective truth is a tiny subset of the subjectivity we experience; the subjectivity we experience is a tiny subset of the subjectivity a person can potentially experience; and the totality of subjectivities a person can potentially experience is a tiny subset of reality. And reality is a subset of God’s infinite more-than-being.

*

The reworking of ontological topologies within a panentheistic enception changes a soul and its enworldment in inconceivable ways. This reworking is religious insight.

*

Yet again, Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Religion is the most advanced technology, beyond all technological advancement.

It’s not that religion rejects or denies magic. It’s that religious insight renders magic boring and it’s that  “spiritual” magic-mongering (more often than not) stunts religious insight.

Bad faith pandemic

Ethics, Philosophy

The original reason I picked up David Cooper’s Existentialism: A Reconstruction, was my recognized that the aggressive spread and intensification of Progressivist identitarianism is a bad faith pandemic.

The passage below, from distills the problem precisely:

The thesis of Being and Nothingness is that conflict is the way of Being-for-others of people who are in bad faith. The implication is that people who ‘convert’ from bad faith will, and must, relate to one another in a different way, that of ‘intersubjective solidarity’. This implied thesis is, I suggest, equivalent to that of reciprocal freedom. That is, the claim that my freedom depends on my ‘collaborating’ in the freedom of others is a restatement of the claim that I exist in good faith only through adopting the perspective of ‘intersubjective solidarity’, and abandoning the ‘oppressive’ attitudes which obtain in the regime of conflict.

The reasoning is as follows. Bad faith, we know, is first and foremost the view of oneself as object-like, as something In-itself or present-to-hand. This view is a false one: in particular it is a failure to recognize one’s capacities of existential freedom. Now we also know that the primary mode of bad faith is ‘the predominance of the Other’: the tendency to view oneself through the eyes of others, as just one more series of events in the universe. However, and crucially, it is only because I regard others in this objectifying manner that, looking at myself through their eyes, I regard myself in this manner too. If others are objects for me, I am an object for them — and hence, via the prism they provide for self-understanding, an object for myself as well. Having broken with ‘intersubjective solidarity’, I receive back from others the objectifying conception I form of them, an ‘image of myself as the Other’. Through treating others as alien, I become alienated from myself, and my freedom becomes an ‘oppressed freedom’ through my effective denial of others’ freedom. This is what Sartre meant by saying that ‘in oppression, the oppressor oppresses himself.’

*

A person indoctrinated in Progressivism will seek self through identity.

As the Progressivist poses it, implicit in the question “Who am I?” or “Who are you?” is an answer of the form “What am I?” or “What are you?”

The progressivist preface “Speaking as [an identity]” implies a “speaking to [an identity]”. Even when this preface is not explicitly voiced, it is implied, and it is felt.

And this identitarianism is not only for public political action. Insistence that the personal is political” ensures that the Progressivist is permanently insulated from others, interpersonal relationship and, most of all, any sense of self.

But according to Progressivism the emptiness, hopelessness, numbness, nihilism, anxiety and anomie experienced by so many Progressivists (and their children) is inflicted by those non-believing nonconformists who refuse to adopt the identity theories Progressivism to accept the identities they confuse for themselves and to behave in the ways Progressivists demand.

Of course, it is obvious all the suffering is caused by the bad faith of Progressivism itself — just as the torments of Christian fundamentalists are caused not by the devil nor by the wicked, but by their own hellish dogma — but there is no arguing with fundamentalists.

Freedom system

Ethics, Politics

From Cooper’s Existentialism: A Reconstruction:

‘In the end,’ writes Marcel, ‘there must be an absolute commitment’, and what
‘matters most’ is the ‘fidelity’ demanded by this commitment. This squares with his earlier rejection of commitment to principles as ‘idolatrous’, since the commitment now in view is to persons — to other people and to God. (Like Buber, Marcel thinks that fidelity to people is intelligible only through a similar relation to God. …)

Corresponding to this commitment to others is a further form of availability. Earlier, unavailability was understood intellectually, as a ‘hardening’ of a person’s descriptive and evaluative categories. What matters more to Marcel
is unavailability to other people. This is ‘rooted in alienation’ from them, an inability to allow them a ‘presence’ or ‘influx’ in one’s life. They are mere ‘cases’ or ‘objects’. ‘When I am with an unavailable person, I am conscious of being with someone for whom I do not exist.’ The last volumes of Proust’s novel depict, in Marcel’s opinion, a coterie of people chronically unavailable to each other, obsessively enclosed in their private worlds as Proust himself was in his cork-lined room.

The remedy for such unavailability is commitment: for it is only through this that others come to ‘have a hold’ on me. And it is through this ‘hold’, and the reciprocal one which I have on them, that our lives interpenetrate and we become truly ‘present’ to one another. But what are the constituents of this reciprocal commitment? In part, the mutual exercise of the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. In charity or ‘generosity’, for instance, I must be pennanently ‘on call’ for the other person, in case he is in need. More interesting is the point made, in very Buberian terms, in this passage: ‘if I treat the Thou as a He [or any identity], I reduce the other to … nature: an animated object … If I treat the other as Thou, I treat him and apprehend him qua freedom … what is more, I help him … to be freed, I collaborate with his freedom.

Availability, then, is a reciprocal relation through which each party is committed not only to treating the other as a free person, but to enabling and ‘collaborating with’ his freedom. This has an important implication. A person can only realize himself’ qua freedom’ as a participant in such reciprocal relations. For, outside of them, he is without ‘collaborators’ to ‘help him … to be freed’. This is what Marcel emphasizes when he writes that in contrast to the ‘captive soul’, the one which is available to others ‘knows that … its freedom … does not belong to itself.

With remarks like these, it is clear that Marcel is in the territory not only of Buber, but of Sartre who, we know, also states that a person’s freedom
‘depends entirely upon the freedom of others’.

Existentialism was conceived in the years preceding the Second World War, when the public became a They, a mass of “people chronically unavailable to each other”.

When folks get woke or red-pilled, they lose availability.

That is how I experience politics.

That is why I hate ideologies: They kill the souls of past, present and future friends and turn them into body-snatched aliens.

Hostility system

Politics, Systems thinking

I think the big difference between me and many people I know is that I see war as caused by general cultural conditions, rather than by any particular faction.

The cultural conditions leading to war produce mutually-antagonistic factions, which naturally regard one another with suspicion.

Each faction’s partly-understood, mostly-imagined reaction to the other provokes a counter-reaction. That counter-reaction, partly-understood and mostly-imagined by the other, provokes another counter-reaction. Back-and-forth it goes, like a two-stroke engine, fueled by contempt, lubricated with slippery-slope grease. Provocation drives provocation. Antipathy feeds antipathy. Paranoia justifies paranoia.

Each side is goaded into acting the villainous part the other casts. Eventually act becomes actual. Each faction’s darkest imaginings become prescient: they knew it all along.

*

Only by viewing the situation from the outside — from outside the perspectives of culture’s hostility system itself — can the absurdity of the system be seen. From either of the hostility system’s perspectives, though, the struggle is clearly one of good and evil.

If we implicitly identify with one of the factions within the system — one of the only possible “sides” one can reasonably take, given the threat the other poses — we are possessed — not only by that faction — not only by the hostility — but most of all by the self-destructive absurdity.

*

Susan believes in reincarnation. She thinks in a past life I was traumatized by war.

I also believe in past lives, except those past lives are those of authors I have read, who experienced the before, during and after of war. They accepted my hospitality and joined my soul, and now they live in me. It is from their vantage that I can see this hostility system from the outside, at least partially, at least some of the time.

*

Yes, this is simplistic.

Yes, it is far more complicated than this.

But reality is always more complicated than truth.

Well-designed truths make smart trade-offs that cut through complication to give us clean access to what matters most.

One-siderists accuse me of being a both-siderist. But that is the furthest thing from the truth. I’m rejecting the whole hostility system and all its idiotic parts and fluids. I reject its “sides”, its constricted perspectives, its brainless passions, its ideological self-deceptions, its dark prophesies. I refuse to become a standardized interchangeable part of the system — an identity, or a bolted together identity intersectional subsystem.

I’m a neither-siderest, as all decent, self-possessed souls should be right now.

I would be ashamed to cooperate with this nonsense, and I am ashamed of the identical nobodies who have given over to it and have adopted system-compliant linguistic habits, behaviors and attitudes.

Eventually, these nobodies — (Are you one of those?) — will try to pretend they were not really part of this. But nobody ever really is. That is what cooperating is, essentially: wholehearted unrealness.

Faith and belief

Judaism

I remember years ago feeling perplexed by the question of whether belief and faith were synonymous, or somehow distinct.

My philosophical-designerly praxis has, over time, induced in me a faith in which, by which, through which I spontaneously experience a sharp, clear distinction between faith and belief. That experience causes me to believe that faith and belief are related, but distinct.

*

Number me among the faithful. But if you’re numbering believers, count me out.

*

  1. The fabric of faith is delicate, unless it is reinforced with texts.
  2. The wrong question can tear faith.
  3. Few of us want to know what we cannot know, and most of us want to not know. So, if you already have your answer, don’t ask.
  4. Etiquette is wise: some incuriosity is prudent, and some concealment is virtuous.
  5. Nobody wants you to bring your whole self to work, and those who invite it want only the part of you that is redundant and countable.
  6. Even when faith is woven between the lines of belief, the thread of faith disintegrates long before beliefs give out.
  7. Nothing is more enviable — nor envied — than authentic faith; hence, false faiths.

*

Truth is what we experience through faith. Belief is what we assert about the truth we experience.

Fun

Philosophy

I woke up last night with an insight: fun is the objectification of the good life.

But the good life is essentially subjective.

By “essentially subjective” I mean that it is an participatory existential state, not a comprehensible event on a timeline with a start and finish.

This bit from the back cover of Blondie’s debut album impressed me as a child: “Blondie hates fun, but they have so much of it that they decided it’s time to unload the real meaning of fun on this LP.” Condemning entire categories of experience is hilarious. When I declare time as my least favorite dimension, I’m stealing this humor from Blondie.

Blondie | by kevin dooley


Sense of nothingness

Enworldment

We have a deficient sense of nothingness.

*

When we lose vision, we do not see blackness. Instead, we see boiling chrome.

When we lose a leg, instead of numbness, we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.

When we lose our hearing, rather than submersion in silence, we hear intolerable hypersonic ringing.

When we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless. It reeks of burning rubber, sulphur and brimstone.

When we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.

*

When we lose sense of purpose, we do not become serene or care-free.

We feel ennui.

When we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective.

On the contrary, this lovelessness is depression.

When we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance.

Instead, we experience a combination of apprehension and intuitive omniscience. We don’t want to know the particulars — we already comprehend them in principle.

(Only if we press against this ignorant omniscience, or if it presses on us, will it break. And when it breaks we are rewarded with disorientation, perplexity, hellish angst… and the possibility of new conception.)

*

When we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless. Instead, we become nebulas of nihilism and ressentiment. The phantom self seethes with hostility and plots vengeful dismantlement of its miscreator.

When we lose our sense of world, we don’t become otherworldly nor innocent. Instead, we become paranoid residents of a phantom world — a realm of concealed demonic machinations, a tangle of puppets and puppet strings, traceable to a baleful beyond.

*

Wherever we lack a sense of God, we mistake ourselves for gods. We succumb to misapotheosis. We believe ourselves final judges of what is good and evil, of what is what is “ok” and “not ok”.

*

Wherever we know God we are of God, toward God, participating in God.

We dance the God with God.

Some of us count and perform steps, hoping they will smooth out and become a fluid motion.

Others of us intuit the dance and spontaneously move with the dance, hoping the movements will gain articulate precision.

This dance is done together, or not at all, with synesse.

Alternative Exodus

Fables, myths & parables, Judaism

In my alternative Exodus, God gives Moses a bill of Ten Rights.

The Israelites still wander about in the wilderness for forty years, craving the relative luxury of Egyptian servitude, but they refuse to invade Canaan because they do not want to displace its indigenous people. Instead they politely settle unoccupied regions in the wilderness. Their new non-European wilderness neighbors welcome them with casseroles and pound cakes. All live together peacefully.

The Prophets are the conscience of the people, the champions of the Ten Rights. They champion the Ten Rights, not only in letter, but, more importantly, in spirit.

Guided by the spirit of the Ten Rights, the Prophets discover and condemn successively subtle infringements. When violent infringements of the Ten Rights are finally conquered, the prophets discover and condemn material infringements. When material infringements are stopped, then speech infringements are condemned. Then infringements of conscious thought are stopped.

Finally, the prophets put a stop even to infringements of unconscious thought.

In this way, God is understood to have given to the Israelites the Infinite Commandment. And now all may think, feel and behave identically, in accordance with God’s infinite tolerance.

Ronald Dworkin’s “Liberalism”

Politics

Ronald Dworkin’s essay “Liberalism” from the essay collection Public and Private Morality has, so far, been a revelation on the order of Mouffe’s Democratic Paradox.

This passage captures a proposed key difference between liberalism and conservatism, both of which, Dworkin acknowledges, desire a conception of liberty, but different conceptions. I think he nails the essential difference:

What does it mean for the government to treat its citizens as equals? That is, I think, the same question as the question of what it means for the government to treat all its citizens as free, or as independent, or with equal dignity. In any case, it is a question that has been central to political theory at least since Kant.

It may be answered in two fundamentally different ways. The first supposes that government must be neutral on what might be called the question of the good life. The second supposes that government cannot be neutral on that question, because it cannot treat its citizens as equal human beings without a theory of what human beings ought to be. I must explain that distinction further. Each person follows a more-or-less articulate conception of what gives value to life. The scholar who values a life of contemplation has such a conception; so does the television-watching, beer- drinking citizen who is fond of saying ‘This is the life’, though of course he has thought less about the issue and is less able to describe or defend his conception.

The first theory of equality supposes that political decisions must be, so far as is possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life. Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions, the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to another, either because the officials believe that one is intrinsically superior, or because one is held by the more numerous or more powerful group. The second theory argues, on the contrary, that the content of equal treatment cannot be independent of some theory about the good for man or the good of life, because treating a person as an equal means treating him the way the good or truly wise person would wish to be treated. Good government consists in fostering or at least recognizing good lives; treatment as an equal consists in treating each person as if he were desirous of leading the life that is in fact good, at least so far as this is possible.

This distinction is very abstract, but it is also very important. I shall now argue that liberalism takes, as its constitutive political morality, the first conception of equality.

“The first theory of equality supposes that political decisions must be, so far as is possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life.”

Yes!

These conceptions, in my view, reach back behind opinions of what is good, to the very conceptions that shape our enworldment — which include those fundamental conceptions that direct our attention, shape our interpretations, invest what we conceive and perceive with relevance, guide our choices, animate our actions and so on.

Liberalism specifically defends and promotes existential freedom.

*

Progressivism is not liberal, because it sees its ideal of social justice as justifying — requiring, in fact — imposition of a certain ideological beliefs that support a society where marginal groups (or at least progressivism’s canonical marginal groups ) can safely assume all people will view them as normal and equal — if not more equal than others.

This, very obviously, is unjust. Or at least, it is obviously unjust to those who are not confined to progressivism’s own limited understanding of the world and, worse progressivism’s own limited understanding of its own intellectual limitations.

*

Back at the height of the George W. Bush regime, I got in an argument with a conservative over gay marriage. He kept insisting that he had to “vote his conscience.” That conscience was a conservative one, but to me he seemed to be a bad American. I still think that. He wanted to limit all Americans to his view of a good life. Well, fuck you, Ron. You’re not qualified to limit how other people live and who they become. You’re not smart enough, deep enough or moral enough to make that judgment. Nobody is. Your own holy book says it.

Similarly, these days, progressivists all seem to feel entitled to make that same kind of judgment, prioritizing their preferred vision of justice over that of others who are subjected to their vision. They can see nothing wrong with workers being required to attend and consent to DiAngelo “antiracist” harangues, and to be made to performatively affirm all kinds of sociological theories they find repugnant or even anathema to their ideal of the good life. They don’t see why people hate it so much, so they’re just going to continue subjecting people to it, whether those people like it or not. Bad Americans!

When the tide turns and someone else’s ideal of the good life is imposed on progressivists, they now have no principled objection to make.

See you in church, asshole.

Liberal space, liberal annihilation

Love, Metaphysics

Liberalism opens cultural space for pluralism to fill.

Liberalism must never be allowed to become annihilation of all that might fill that open space.

If this latter happens — if all particular beliefs are corroded and eaten away by fanatical skepticism or battered with dogmatic anti-dogmatism — not only does liberalism become nihilistic — it becomes a nihilistic monism, antipluralism, illiberalism — a negation of itself into a something worse than anything it negates.

(So says an exnihilist, who wishes to tap the nothingness, and allow epiphanic somethingness to pour in.)

Real and ideal

Design, Enworldment, Politics

Bruno Latour: “What is real resists.”

Reality most conspicuously resists our ideals.

What do we do when reality and ideal diverge?

We can be incurious, and ignore the gap.

We can be ideological, and condemn those who make it hard to ignore the gap.

We can impersonate gods, and condemn the gap itself.

We can be industrious, and reshape the world to conform to our ideals.

We can be reflective, and reshape our ideals to conform to the world.

We can be designerly, and reshape the world and our ideals together.

Design is not a praxis.

Design is praxis.