All posts by anomalogue

The tangibility of ideology

Politics

I’ve noticed something important about how I experience political ideology.

For most people, it seems, the primary significance of political ideology is its intentions. What can we expect this political movement to do? What kind of society does it seek to bring about? How will it change our lives if it gains power? Seen this way, ideologies are most important for how they help us predict future behaviors.

For me, political ideologies are an intrinsic part of a person’s practical philosophy and, by extension, their personality, which includes not only their immediate thoughts, feelings, perceptions and responses but what they make, and what they choose to use and to surround themselves with.

For me philosophy is an immediate, tangible reality that is very much present in the people around me.

And I have experienced the spread of progressivism in my social circles as an enormous loss of humanity. Wherever it takes root, there is less room for personal uniqueness, and only for what can be encapsulated by identity and invested with power to force acknowledgement. This is the consequence of believing that “the personal is political.” Progressivism imagines itself as attacking large powerful groups, but its real target is the unique person — persons identical to others only in the fact of their uniqueness.

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I hate progressivism not because of what it will someday do, but because of what it does right now to people possessed by it.

Participatory empiricism

Philosophy

I was talking with a friend about my suspicion that understandings empiricism as based primarily on perception rather than on interaction has distorted not only our epistemology, but our ontology of knowing. This perception-centricity is at the heart of what we think knowing is, how we think knowing works, and what we hope knowing might accomplish. (I have to wonder how many skepticisms are the result of dashed episto-ontologies? “If truth isn’t what I conceived it to be — well, it must be an illusion!”)

When we take perception as our paradigmatic intuitions, truth becomes about a reality “out there” — seen, heard, or otherwise witnessed from a distance. This, I believe, encourages us to assume an impersonal god’s-eye-view from nowhere/everywhere (what I’ve called “eclipse”) when meditating on ultimate realities.

I prefer to see truth as something that emerges in our interactions with reality and which informs our ongoing participation in a reality that includes and involves but also exceeds us. Our truth is something we draw around us, like a blanket, which informs our understanding and our responses to our environing reality. We enworld ourselves within reality. An empiricism rooted in interactions encourages a human-situated perspective (what I’ve called “solipse”), as opposed to eclipse.

My friend suggested calling this empiricism based on interaction “participatory empiricism” in contrast to the more usual “perceptive empiricism”. That is exactly the right term.

Participatory empiricism.

Self-inquisitions

Philosophy

Love of truth and faithfulness to reality are not only not the same, they can be violently opposed.

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We sometimes — often? — protect ourselves from a reality by loving the idea of that reality instead of the reality itself.

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The most furious smashers of idols destroy material rivals to their conceptual idols. They are “God fearing” to a degree beyond their comprehension.

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Self-inquisitions:

Do I love the idea of poetry more than I love poems?

Do I love the idea of religion more than religion?

Do I love the idea of alterity more than alterity?

What am I resisting…? but how right am I to resist it?

*

I do do not trust any love unmixed with dread.

Love is essentially transcendent, and transcendence is essentially dreadful.

Dreadless love is mere lust. The mildest lusts are the most secure against accidental love. Keep it all inside the mind’s confines.

*

Maybe some degree of idolatry is not only inevitable, but also good.

From Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy

Philosophy

A series of passages from Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy isolates the central problem I have had with Rorty, and with other thinkers I have admired, who live such an academically-conditioned existence that they have lost contact with the tacit world, and inhabit instead what I have called “wordworld“. Such people are so verbal they have lost themselves in the language game, like we lose ourselves in a book or a movie or an ideology.

What does it take to call us back to the reality of ourselves and to what transcends our language? And how do we — as whole-beinged beings — experience this calling back from linguistic play. How do we react to this unchaining of our heads and bodies, this invitation to freedom from the sedentary linguistic metaverse?

Here are the passages:

§ 226 – L

Nor is the world coaxed into being by communities of the like.

Community is made possible by the world we share.

*

§ 226 – R

Richard Rorty:

To drop the idea of languages as representations, and to be thoroughlyWittgensteinian in our approach to language, would be to de-divinise the world…

On the view I am suggesting, the claim that an ‘adequate’ philosophy must make room for our intuitions is a reactionary slogan, one which begs the question at hand. For it is essential to my view that we have no pre-linguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how thmgs are which it is the duty of philosophers to spell out in language. Rather, all we have is a disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors. Unless we suffer from what Derrida calls ‘Heideggerian nostalgia’, we shall not think of our ‘intuitions’ as more than platitudes, as more than the habitual use of a certain repertoire of terms, more than old tools which as yet have no modern replacements.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Just try — in a real case — to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.

*

§ 227 – L

Skepticism, seen from a lyric perspective, is loss of the world via language. To become lost in language, and thereby to have lost the world.

…

§ 263 – L

In Rorty’s view, Bloom’s ‘strong poet’ accepts that system ultimately holds the key to meaning, and hence accepts that the collapse of system shows the futility of asserting that anything is meaningful. Unless this is intended merely as a definition of ‘strong poet’, my sense is that there are at least some ‘strong poets’ who would reject this characterization of their enterprise (as well as the imperialism implicit in Bloom’s original). Their ‘realism’ is not naive — they accept that perception can be conditioned by a variety of biological and cultural factors, and they have grasped at least some of the consequences of the failure of systematic ‘objective’ explanations fully to house truth. However, their ‘realism’ is real in the sense that they affirm the possibility of meaning; and further, believe that it is not something which is entirely intra-linguistic.

Collective autism

Philosophy

(Note: I wrote this back in June of 2022, but abandoned it. It was never properly finished, and it falls apart toward the end. I’m publishing it now, in February 2023, in unfinished rough form because I need to link to it from a post I am writing today.)

The first time I saw Brené Brown’s video on empathy versus sympathy I was surprised by her definitions. She defines empathy as “feeling with people” which “fuels connection” and characterizes sympathy as something which “drives disconnection” — a sort of distancing sentimentality.

When I checked her definition against current popular thought, I found that this redefinition appears to be an emerging consensus.

The definitions of empathy and sympathy I’d learned were quite different. Merriam-Webster more closely reflects my understanding of the distinction:

Sympathy (which comes from the Greek sym, meaning “together,” and pathos, referring to feelings or emotion) is used when one person shares the feelings of another; an example is when one experiences sadness when someone close is experiencing grief or loss. Empathy is also related to pathos. It differs from sympathy in carrying an implication of greater emotional distance. With empathy, you can imagine or understand how someone might feel, without necessarily having those feelings yourself.

They encapsulate the difference as: “Sympathy is sharing”, “Empathy is understanding”.

My favorite description of empathy as I understand it comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz. This is probably the tenth time I’ve quoted it on this blog:

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

Geertz’s construal of a mode of expression or symbol system is the kind of empathy I practice as a design researcher.

When my design team develops an empathic understanding of a person that allows us to grasp a proverb, catch an allusion, see a joke — get why they aspire to this ideal or that, why some issue arouses delight or disgust or indifference, and so on — we acquire a better ability to innovate and design for them.

While I’m repeating myself, I’ll add another idea I’ve said a half-million times before: these empathic understandings of others do two very important things. First, they attune us to the other person’s way of experiencing the world, so that we are better able to judge what they will view as useful, usable and desirable. Second, they teach us new ways to conceive truth, which affords us surprising new capacities to ideate. These novel conceptive capacities manifest as epiphanies. We exclaim “That gives me an idea!” — and because the conception of that idea was enabled by learning the other person’s way of understanding, it is far more likely to be on the mark. I call the generation of insights that produce these on-the-mark epiphanies “precision inspiration”.

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Returning to these two incompatible definitions of empathy and sympathy, a question comes to mind: What accounts for such a drastic redefinition of established terms?

Why would sympathy be demoted from fellow-feeling to vapid gestures of pity, and why would empathy go from an understanding of another’s feelings to an intentional act of fellow-feeling?

I have a somewhat pessimistic theory: I believe this is a symptom of a general loss of pluralistic capacity.

Pluralism is the capacity to assume multiple first-person modes of understanding and to temporarily think about the world from that standpoint. It is having access to multiple interpretations and thought processes that give insight into other people’s feelings, opinions and practical responses.

Everyone has some degree of pluralistic capacity. The question is one of accommodation. How many understandings can a person accommodate? How prepared is a person to accommodate yet another understanding — one that is as-yet inconceivable?

One one end of the spectrum is autism — a monism so profound that it makes one mind-blind. The autistic person’s understanding is the only possible one, and it is so narrow that it cannot expand to accommodate even slight variations. Anything outside that narrow range is inconceivable and triggers the intense apprehension induced by all encounters with inconceivability.

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My theory holds that our popular culture has devolved to a sort of collective autism, but, weirdly, one that is occupied with the ideals of pluralism — which includes the ideal of empathy as well as diversity. In this, it is similar to fundamentalisms that adhere very strictly to the rules, symbols and doctrine of a faith while failing to understand or respond to any of it by way of the faith that originally engendered it.

The ideals become objects of worship, not expressions of something deeper that moves us.

Our fundamentalist notion of diversity is able only to accommodate a single theory of diversity, and any deviation from that theory causes extreme autistic anxiety reactions and misbehavior that are confused with PTSD, but are symptoms of stunted maturity and maladaption.

To stave off both the anxiety and the triggering reactions of others, the collectivity (as a society) engages in social skills training to help it identify types of people (“identities”), to learn phases and gestures to recite or perform when interacting with them, and to learn the difference between appropriate and inappropriate words and behaviors.

DEI (Diversity/Equity/Inclusion) is an autistic approximation of pluralism.

*

In the place of pluralism, our collectively autistic public thought is dominated by a single ideology. Thought beyond this ideology is literally inconceivable.

This ideological monism however, presents itself as embracing the full diversity of humankind — and as far as it can tell it does.

But what it does not and cannot embrace is diverse thinking about diversity. It thinks about diversity in only one way, and finds every other way of understanding diversity inconceivable and unconscionable. It is a monism that thinks about pluralism a lot but is unable to think pluralistically.

A monistic ideology of pluralism and diversity cannot do pluralism.

And doing pluralism is what empathy essentially is.

When it comes to thinking about alterity — otherness — it only understands one way, by the only logic it knows how to use. Let’s call this monistic ideology of diversity “monological diversity”.  This renders the former meaning of the word empathy unintelligible. In place of pluralism, we have established a monistic concept of “diversity” — a way of thinking about segments of people that every person is expected to affirm, or face ostracism.

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What is pluralism, and why is it not a synonym for diversity?

From a monistic understanding there is no difference. Pluralism and diversity are both the principled inclusion of all kinds of people.

But from a pluralistic understanding, the difference is of utmost significance. Pluralism embraces multiple understandings — even multiple understandings of diversity, itself.

A monistic understanding privileges a single understanding as valid — not because it has considered multiple perspectives, weighed their relative merits and tradeoffs, and chosen the one that seems most true, most moral or most fitting to the circumstance — but rather, because this one understanding is only one it knows. Everything else, just “dorsn’t make sense.” It says “I don’t see how they can even think that.” But monistic understanding does not have the intellectual space for asking whether this is not one’s own failure of understanding.

To monistic understanding, something not making sense — especially moral sense — is a positive perception that the thing is nonsensical or immoral.

Monistic understandings terminate in a naive realism.

Transfigurative philosophy?

Philosophy

Once you realize that understanding what has been, to you, inconceivable and incomprehensible requires a change…

— possibly a deep and transfigurative change…

— that the solution to the problem is “in here” in one’s way of understanding, as well as “out there” in the material to be understood…

— and once you take as your goal the self-transfiguration required to understand…

— and accept as part of the effort the frequently excruciating labor involved in making these transfigurations…

— it is probably fair to admit that the effort is not really philosophy, anymore, as most philosophers conceive it.

This work is something else — something outside the rules of the game of philosophy as played by professional philosophers in the arena of professional philosophy.

Here, outside mind and beyond language that purports to represent the mind, players of the anarchic philosophical game seem not to know how to move about.

I suppose the decent thing is to admit finally that this is a religious effort, though now it will face rejection from the religious side…

Lyric philosophy

Philosophy

I’ve never thought of my preferred mode of philosophy as lyric, but Zwicky’s lyric philosophy is, if not the same, very close to what I am trying to do:

It is in this way, then, that philosophy might assume lyric form: when thought whose eros is clarity is driven also by profound intuitions of coherence — when it is also an attempt to arrive at an integrated perception, a picture or understanding of how something might affect us as beings with bodies and emotions as well as the ability to think logically. Or when it is an investigation informed by or moving towards an appreciation of such a picture or understanding. When philosophy attempts to give voice to an ecology of experience.

…

Lyric philosophy desires to speak to whole humans; but for this to occur, the language of thought would itself have to be made whole.

Voluminosity

Biography

When I first moved to Atlanta, I saw it primarily through the windsheilds of cars and windows of buildings.

During my brief but transformative residence in Toronto I learned to rely on my bicycle as my primary mode of transportation.

Returning to Atlanta, and experiencing it from my bicycle changed my conception of its space. What had been a network of linear tracks and decision-points, connecting interior with interior, was now revealed to be a wide-open terrain of free movement. The linear network was densely crisscrossed with shortcuts across alleyways, parking lots, lawns and wooded areas. Whatever path I chose was lined with sounds and smells and faces. Flowing with traffic was not enforced. I could notice, interact, stop, pull over, take in where I am.

But that isn’t the end of it. My new alertness to birds has lifted this free plane above the ground, and raised it up into the trees and over the buildings. It has also filled up the interstices of all possible paths, flowing into gullies, gardens, underbrush and hidden places. It turns out that Atlanta is a reverberant, living volume. I cannot tune it out, and I feel crazy.

*

There are so many worlds in this world, populating it, radiating intelligence into it. Myriads within myriads — a zillion everythings.

Multipersonal perplexity

Enworldment, Ethics, Extended Self

A.

Long ago, (perhaps informed by experiences sitting in meditation?) even before I began intensive philosophical study, I adopted a psychology of “subpersonalities“. I’ve talked about it dozens of ways, but the language orbits a single conviction: our personal subjects are microcosmic societies, composed of semi-independent intuitive units.

One of the main reasons I came to this belief was noticing that subjects do not always respect the borders of the individual. Pairs of people can form a sort of personality together, and this personality can leave bits of each person behind. Sometimes this new joint-personality can threaten existing ones, leading to jealousy and estrangement.

Taking-together the idea of subpersonalities and superpersonalities (“ubermenschen” wouldn’t be a bad German synonym) leaves our ordinary personal subjects in a strange position. We both comprehend subjects that are aspects of our selves, but we also are comprehended by subjects in whom we participate.

One of my most desperate insights — which I need to find a way to say clearly and persuasively — is that we are much better at thinking about what we comprehend as objects than we are at thinking what comprehends us as subjects in which we participate, but which transcend our comprehension. I believe we need to learn this participatory mode transcendent subjective thought so we can navigate difficult interpersonal and social situations we find ourselves in, and avoid the mistake (the deepest kind of category mistake) of translating these situations (literally “that in which we are situated”) into objectively comprehensible terms that make understanding impossible. We lack the enworldment to think or respond to such situations.

A subject can be smaller than, larger than, or the same size as a personal subject.

Subjectivity is scalar.

B.

Perplexity is another idea that has obsessed me since I underwent, navigated and overcame my own first perplexity, and experienced a deep and powerful epiphany — an epiphany about perplexities.

(To summarize: A perplexity is a subjective condition where our conceptions fail, and we cannot even conceive the problem, much less progress toward a solution. We instinctively fear and avoid perplexities, sensing them with feelings of apprehension at what resists comprehension, because perplexity is the dissolution of a subject.)

Emerging on the other side of my first overcome perplexity, I understood the positive, creative potential of perplexity. I realized (in the sense that it became real to me) that much of the worst pain and most egregious offense I’d sustained to that point in my life were, at least in part, perplexities that I had interpreted as externally inflicted — and that I had interpreted them that way because my objectivizing enworldment supported no other way of conceiving them.

This epiphany re-enworlded me in a way that I could discern when — or at least try to discern when — perplexities were contributing or amplifying distress in my life. When I later learned the word “metanoia” I recognized it as describing what happened to me. It happens to many people, and once you know it, you can feel it radiating from them. It is palpable.

This insight into the relationship between perplexity and epiphany is my philosopher’s stone, who transmutes leaden angst into golden insight.

The worst things that can happen to us can potentially be the best things that happen to us… if we have a sense of how to move about in the shadowy realms, where we say “here I don’t know my way about“.

Perplexity is the dissolution of subject — a sort of subjective death — that makes possible resolution of a new subject — a subjective rebirth: metanoia.

C.

If we believe that subjects can be larger than an individual subjectivity (so, for instance a marriage is a subject within which each spouse’s subject subsists)…

…and we also believe that when a subject undergoes perplexity that very deep conceptions lose their effectiveness and must be reconceived if the subject is to regain living wholeness…

…why would we suppose that only an individual person can be perplexed?

I believe that multipersonal perplexities are real.

It seems improbable that I never took-together scalar subjectivity and perplexity as the dissolution of subject, and never followed the pragmatic consequences of conceiving these ideas together, but doing so feels like… an epiphany.

*

Just as a perplexity can grip a single personal subject, it can also grip a subject of two people, or three, or a dozen or multiple dozens. It can grip hundreds, thousands, millions, or multiple billions. Entire cultures can be perplexed.

Try to imagine a perplexed marriage; a perplexed friendship; a perplexed organization, a perplexed community; a perplexed academic subject.

(Thomas Kuhn imagined perplexed scientific communities.

Try to imagine a perplexed civilization.

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I mean “to to imagine” literally. Consider pausing and concretely trying to imagine what multipersonal perplexities might be like if encountered in real life.

Try to imagine a perplexed married couple.

Try to imagine a perplexed organization.

Try to imagine a perplexed community.

*

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If you tried to imagine these scenarios, reflect: Did you imagine being in the situation as a first-person participant, subjectively experiencing the perplexity from the inside? Or did you observe the situation from outside, as an third-person observer of other people embroiled in perplexity?

Can you evert the perspective, and imagine the same scenario, situated within it as an a first-person participant, and and situated outside it as a third-person observer?

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If you can, assume with me for a moment that collective perplexities really are possible, and consider a speculative scenario:

Party A and Party B have entered a collective perplexity.

Party A is the privileged party in these scenarios, blessed by me (the inventor of these scenarios and all the assumptions governing them) with true insights into “what is really going on”. It’s an invented scenario, so there can be a true truth here, if nowhere else.

Party B sees things differently (and, again, because this is my custom-made vanity scenario) incorrectly. Party B rejects the notion of perplexity and sees what is happening according to its own worldview, which has no perplexity concept. What Party A claims is perplexity, Party B perceives as needless conflict caused largely by Party A’s iffy (or worse) beliefs and actions.

So, Party A conceives what is happening as a collective perplexity, and attempts to engage Party B in a perplexity-resolving response — a transcendent sublation.

Consider a first variant of the scenario: Faction B wants to recover the collective mode of being that existed prior to the perplexity, and “turns around” and attempts to move back to how things were before the conflict began. How does this play out?

Now, consider a second variant: Faction B decides to bring an end to the conflict through breaking free of Faction B altogether. It secedes, or splits off, forms a new denomination, or resigns, or hits unfollow, or blocks or mutes, or divorces, or cuts off contact, or whatever separation mechanism makes sense for the kind of faction A and B are. How does this play out?

Now consider a third variant: Faction B decides to fight and dominate Faction B. It makes Faction A a deal it can’t refuse. Or it tries to use the justice to force its will. Or it tries to steal an election through various kinds of deceit and treachery. It tries to weaken, dissolve or destroy some institutions and strengthen, reinforce or build others in order to dominate faction A. How does this play out?

There is a fourth variant, but I don’t want to digress.

What is the ethical obligation of Party A and Party B in each of these variants? How does each see the other’s?

*

I have been in deeply perplexed relationships where I was the only one who saw a perplexity, and so I could not win the cooperation required to resolve it. I could not resolve the perplexity of the relationship alone, so I had to resolve the perplexity in myself. This resolved perplexity, however, is not the shared perplexity. The shared perplexity is left unresolved, unasked and unanswered in a state of nothingness.

Over the years, I have gradually learned to avoid such perplexities, except where I sense a possibility of fruitful struggle. Most of the time, with most people, however, I keep things light and gloss over anything that might cause apprehension. I have learned to get along with most people most of the time, and that means keeping my active philosophy to myself.

I have also been in many superficially perplexed relationships, which, because they were superficial, could be collaboratively resolved. Design research has been my laboratory.

Once every decade or so, I get stuck in a situation — usually with a client with little hands-on design experience, but with much learned-about “design expertise” — who can neither cooperate nor resist the impulse to dominate the process, who makes resolution of the perplexity possible. And these leave me detaching from the shared perplexity and resolving a perplexity of my own, not the shared one.

(I feel every lost shared perplexity, whether deep or shallow, like an intellectual phantom limb. It is nothing — but nothingness feels terrible. I see no reason to pretend it doesn’t bother me, or that I can just unilaterally “forgive”, which an individual effort, without mutual reconciliation, which is a collaborative effort.)

I have also had one extremely deep shared perplexity resolve in a shared resolution.

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars –:
So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around –,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Dematerializing

Enworldment, Philosophy

I read strangely.

When I read, I work hard at understanding the material, but I do not put much effort into retaining the material.

Rather, I use the effort to understand to repattern my conceptions.

As I read, I look for signs of textual attunement or misattunement. I pay close attention to when I am confused or perplexed, or when I am partially or superficial understanding, which means I am misunderstanding. Alert but easy following — fluent reception (influence?) of words into sentences into ideas — spontaneous, intuitive comprehension — these are all positive indications that I am becoming someone capable of understanding this material.

I also notice changes in my experience of the world. What odd details stand out to me as significant, or curious, or beautiful, or mysterious, or disturbing, or infuriating? And what is the overall tone of life?

Instead of trying to possess the material, I allow the material to transform me.

In this state, I write what I am moved to write. These are my own concepts in my own words, but they are formed and animated by conceptions from others, others who have taken a place in my soul. I am densely possessed.

*

I know there are significant tradeoffs to my way of reading. I acquire no expertise. If someone asks me to summarize what I read, or to respond to some particular passage, I am likely to be at a loss. The material is not retained, only the conceptions that give the material meaning. The conceptions continue giving meaning, though, and what is given meaning is lived reality.

What is given this way, I never lose, because it is now part of me, and shows in the givenness of the world.

*

When I am in my library, engaged in conversation with friends, they are sometimes confused or amused by my gesturing to various authors whose conceptions I feel animating my thoughts. I know exactly where each of them sits around me on my shelves, and who is helping me be myself at any moment. I am at home.

*

Do I live in a wordworld? Most people who know me would think so.

*

My Orthodox Christian friends tell me that they do not pray to icons, but rather pray through them.

*

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

…Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men’s minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man’s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e. that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether.

— Beatrice Warde, “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible”

*

Printing should be invisible.

As should words, sentences, passages.

As should concepts and systems of concepts.

As should truth.

*

If we love reality, or aspire to love reality, we will choose truths that reveal reality rather than represent it, explain it, model it, or otherwise eclipse it. Our truths will not be objects of contemplation. Our truths will be subjects who contemplate.

*

“When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.” — Nietzsche

Wordworld

Poetry

Living in a wordworld drives our attention on tracks to this and to that but not to the other.

The tracks may be intricately dense, but the spaces between the tracks are infinite.

No, I do not mean the spaces between one noticing and another, along our sporadically unconscious and conscious lines of thought.

No, I mean the atmospheric irrelevance, the unasked nothingness, where words have never carried us.

On the subject of subjects

Philosophy

I have been thinking a lot about “background philosophies”, the ideas we think with, and “foreground philosophies”, the ideas we think about.

I have equated background philosophies with subjects.

Whether it is a personal subject, or an academic subject, it does not matter. My thought has brought me to an understanding of subjects that on principle blurs that distinction into irrelevance.

Subjects are the ideas we think with, by which a certain objectivity can be experienced as objectively true.

I call these subjects, which are modes of objectivities, “enworldments”, and this is probably a much better term than “background philosophy”, because the minute you say “philosophy” there is an expectation that it is made out of concepts that can be objectively presented, talked about, compared combined and manipulated. But an enworldment is made of inter-related conceptions that are known solely by their effect: conceiving, or experiencing meaning of some specific kind. We come to understand a subject by comprehending its objects of knowledge (its concepts) but what is also acquired is the form of objectivity essential to that specific subject.

A discussion of subjects of various kinds might be helpful. Follow my line of thought and see if you pick up the sense of what I am saying.

When we were young, we learned subjects in school which taught us to understand, think and respond mathematically, historically, literarily and so on, each subject in s different way. Many (most?) people — even some teachers, unfortunately — casually see academic subjects as collections of conceptual content, and forget how, until the subject is actually understood — until the student acquires the conceptions required to conceive the concepts and take it all together as meaningful — the material is just an overwhelming heap of pointless, anxiety-inflicting chaos.

It is a mystery how the conception comes to existence in a student, but good teachers learn to make these epiphanies happen in the minds of individual students. The lightbulb turns on, and the student gets it. The bad teachers we remember from our childhoods (Susan assures me there are very few of them today), shared the popular misconception that their subject is the sum of its conceptual material and just drilled the objective information into the children’s head without also teaching the subject that gives the objective content meaning.

In my marriage, I have learned to understand, think and respond Susanly. I was bad at it for many years, and just couldn’t understand why she said, did and felt the way she did. She seemed bonkers, and I did infuriating things. Eventually, I realized I had to let her teach me her subject, and luckily for me, she is a pedagogical genius and did a great job. Now, not only does she make good sense to me, but I rely on what she taught me in my own thinking — including these thoughts you are reading right now.

My profession, research-informed design, constantly requires me to learn new subjects. I ask people to teach me their subject so I can to understand, think and respond to them with design interventions that fit their enworldments and the practical conditions of their lives (“the design context”). Novice designers often see research as gathering data — facts about behaviors, thoughts, emotions people feel — and they work rigorously to set their own subjectivity aside so they can analyze and synthesize the data objectively and say true things about the data we gathered. This rigorous work is helpful in ways, but not as a means to generate understanding. The subject is learned in the interviews. The rigorously analyzed objective data helps us test whether we really learned and understand the subject or if we are fudging by, using the wrong subject (our own!) to misunderstand the material.

*

So we have two modes of intellectual activity: one where an enworldment, subject, is primarily in play, and another where objects of knowledge are primarily in play.

I say “primarily” because subjects and objects are involved in every case.

But that primary makes all the difference in the quality of the play.

*

All this was recap, meant to set the stage for this newish idea:

Today, I am wondering if the difference between a religious mode of intellectual work and a philosophical mode isn’t this:

  • a religious mode focuses on the thinking (living) subject, and
  • a philosophical mode focuses on the thought object.

Most religious people seem to find practical — ethical, emotional and symbolic –activity (ritual) most effective for working on the thinking, living, existing subject. Intellectually working on the thinking, living subject seems almost a contradiction — and to be frank about it, in most cases it probably is a contradiction.

If we continue with the logic of this experimental distinction, defining philosophy as focusing on thought objects, philosophizing about religion would be an escape from religion. The thinking subject focuses on objective religious content, manipulating concepts as ideas exterior to oneself. Based on my sparse reading of theology, I believe much theology has been precisely this: an objectivizing escape from subjective entanglement with what is thought about. For instance, we think about God, in what manner God might or might not exist, what arguments support or weaken various ways of believing in different God-concepts. Or we might skim religious texts and scoop useful concepts out of various religions and integrate them with our own conceptual systems to show how religious systems all, more or less, agree — and not only with each other, but with how we understand things to be.

But it is also possible to think religiously — to think in a manner that is meant to change our own subjectivity. This mode of thought also thinks about religious idea, and it superficially resembles philosophical thinking about religion — but the attitude, focus and goal is profoundly different: it seeks to illuminate the ideas thought with to understand the religious ideas thought about. It is sensitive to the subject, the enworldment, and tries to modify itself to conceive religious material in new ways that induces change both to one’s own subject, its objectivity and the objective sense of the material.

Religious intellectual work pays close attention to the experience of thinking and notices not only the concepts and the concept system, but one’s own response to it — what happens inside one’s own heart, gut, hands, etc. when thinking it — and these responses guide the work just as much as the material, just as a talented teacher pays as much attention to her student’s face, tone, body language as to what the student says when quizzed on the material.

The guiding faith here is that there is something important to understand in the material — (or if you subscribe to the perennialist conception of esoterism, many overlaid successively esoteric understandings of the material) — that may be actualized if one finds the subjectivity to re-conceive it.

Understanding is the spur to bring us to ever more accommodating understandings of a multistable symbol system, and having faith in a religion is actively believing that, for this sacred symbology, each successive understanding will bring us to a new understanding which, once we arrive, we will experience as better than the last. The last understanding is not revealed to be wrong, but it is now understood how it could be even more true. Presumably, this kind of reconception can happen again and again, even when we are most sure we have arrived at the ultimate understanding. This is because we cannot conceive of a better understanding until we actually conceive it.

I do believe that perennialism is right that there is infinite, successive multistability in sacred symbologies. Where I disagree with perennialism is believing that revelation of such symbologies came to an end a thousand years ago.

I believe art can instaurate new infinite symbologies, if artists adopt religious ways of working, and stop pastiching around with old and novel forms.

*

“Religious intellectual work pays close attention to the experience of thinking and notices not only the concepts and the concept system, but one’s own response to it.” So, what are these responses we should pay attention to, and how should we respond to these responses?

I will make a brief list of the ones I consider most important for reading and navigating the waters. This is not an exhaustive list of everything helpful to know to navigate perplexity, but is is a good start. I have also made a list of designerly virtues and another of rights we can extend to collaborators in perplexing situations that are relevant to this subject.

  • Apprehension: This is the disturbing sense that something is wrong with an idea. One can sense that it is important in some unknown way, but also that it won’t yield to full comprehension. It compels and repels. It can be touched with the fingertips of thought, but it cannot be grasped. We are tempted to push it away as confusion, as something for someone else to understand, or something slightly dangerous to understand which might seduce us to delusion. If it compels us more that repels us, it will draw us into perplexity. Apprehension is the feeling of impending perplexity.
    – Practical advice: If you want to do original work, don’t follow your bliss; follow your apprehension.
  • Questionlessness: We stop knowing what the problem is. We cannot explain what is wrong. If a group is perplexed, nobody even knows where the disagreement is. Nobody can agree on what is relevant or not. There is only a churn of chaotic semi-ignorant talking past each other.
    – Practical advice: Learn to see that framing a problem or posing a question is a major accomplishment, a fruit of conception. It is in fact much harder to clarify a question than to answer it. Answering is the inspiring, fun, playful part. Getting to where the question can be asked — especially asked inspiringly — is sheer hell. (See angst/dread below.)
  • Techlessness: We are now in a space where technique and expertise is not only useless, but harmful. The more we try to use concepts that helped us in the past the more we fail, or succeed in a way that we can feel is failing to do justice to the situation. People who believe there always must be a technique for doing anything will be tempted to make do with whatever seems the best technique available. They will solve a problem for sure, but not the one at hand.
    – Practical advice: Try every technique, but stay sensitive to when they are inadequate for the situation. Improvisation, experimentation, trial and groping by the faintest of intuitions will eventually yield new techniques and expertise, but this will come late in the process, not early when we are most desperate for technical guidance.
  • Angst/dread: This is a feeling of helpless distress, and it is caused by perplexity — lacking a conception needed to make any sense of a situation. What is crucial to know about perplexity is it is a subjective state, and affects one’s entire enworldment. It has no object and it is caused by no object, even if thinking about an object or objects of thought induced the subjective state. If we only know how to think about objects, we will not only be perplexed, we will be doubly-perplexed (“metaperplexed”, ugh) — perplexed by being perplexed — and worse, we will misinterpret it objectively by blaming various objects for the pain, such as bad actors, devils, social phenomena, secret conspiracies, wicked behaviors, insensitivity, oppression — whatever image bears our ideal of evil, that is the object causing the angst or dread. And this objectifying response intensifies and prolongs the perplexity and multiplies the pain attending it.
    – Practical advice: Do not take objectifications at face value. Look beneath objects of angst and across them and instead of taking them literally, or grasping them as causes, view them as symptoms of subjectivity. And they are not symptoms of a disease, either. They are birth pangs of an emerging subject.
  • New significance: Things begin to stand out in our experience as significant. They may be positive or negative in tone. Words, images, sounds, tones, moods begin to recur and attract our attention or trigger feelings. New tastes reveal new experiences of beauty or weaken old tastes. Since reading Jan Zwicky I have lost my ability to tune out birdsong, and I know this means something is happening. I do not know what, but I suspect it might lead me where I need to go if I read it right.
    – Practical advise: Notice what you notice, and take note.
  • New associations: Heterogenous things feel connected. The feeling that they are connected long precedes explanation how or why.
    – Practical advice: Hold on to associations and do not try to explain them immediately. Do not reject them if they are inexplicable, but instead value them even more. These takings-together may be embryonic conceptions, and might lead to entirely new modes of explanation.
  • Poetic eruptions: Moments of inspiration hit and guide our behaviors, without our conscious direction, though we are highly conscious of what is happening.
    – Practical advice: If you are moved to write, write what comes. Do not filter any of it by what you can justify or even understand. Let it emerge to be understood later. Bob Dylan, a master of this practice, said: “At dawn my lover comes to me and tell me of her dreams, with no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means. At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true. And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden.”
  • Epiphany: Conception happens. A flash of insight hits, some object of understanding stands out clearly. It might be words, a metaphor, a sense of resolve, a vision, a distinct feeling, a melodic line — I believe epiphany can take any form. Mine always arrive visually and structurally as simple geometric shapes or diagrams. But the object is only the core of a subject, and that subject ripples out through our understanding of everything. We can feel the transfiguration of our enworldment before we know what objective truths changed for us. We discover them everywhere, and sometimes we discover that people around us already knew them and were trying to show them to us, but we could not yet conceive what they were showing.
    – Practical advice: When we have an epiphany, we might only be learning a conception someone else has been trying to share with us. For them, that epiphany might have been the result of long, painful work that you did not have to do, because you were given it — as a gift. The objective form your epiphany takes might differ from theirs, but this does not change the fact that you were given the conception that engendered your object. Reducing the accomplishment to the generation of the objective concept, without acknowledging the subjective conception that engendered it — a much, much harder-won, painfully-won accomplishment — is stealing the gift of epiphany.
  • Gratitude: If we learn to notice how subjects and objectivity works, we begin to understand how much we are given and how valuable it is. Then gratitude isn’t obligation, or something you have to make yourself feel. Gratitude just happens constantly. And we are substantially, subjectively connected by this gratitude, this sacred, entangling exchange of gifts. These gifts, this gratitude, this dense entangling, this unaccountable exchange — it creates We.
    – Practical advice: Desire indebtedness — look for it, notice it. Honor the entanglements of indebtedness with gratitude. It means we are not alone, and do not have to be.

*

God is not an object with an existence or non-existence.

God is an infinite subject we will never stop learning and relearning. God is the Subject of subjects.

I am entirely unable to not believe this, and that is why I am religious.

*

I think philosophical thoughts religiously.

The roots of givenness

Judaism

My family uses a haggadah from the Jewish Labor Committee. It gets overbearingly, even comically, socialist at many points, but we love it. Before blessing the wine, we read:

Consider the cup of wine which we are about to drink. Countless sets of hands played a role in bringing this wine to our seder: the entrepreneurs and farm-owners who decided to direct their energies and capital into the wine business, the workers who planted and pruned the vines, those who picked the grapes, the vintners who directed the fermentation of freshly-harvested fruits into wine, the janitors who kept the winery clean and sanitary, the truck drivers and loading dock workers who transported the finished product, the clerks at the wine shops, and the servers who bring the wine to our tables tonight.

*

Our world is a miracle of coordinated effort. If we don’t pay attention as consumers we can forget this and casually stop remembering that food doesn’t just grow on grocery shelves.

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What you consume comes from somewhere, and you might be surprised how much effort and pain is invested in bringing you your pleasures.

*

This principle is true, also, for philosophical consumption.

The conceptions that inspire and delight you were brought forth from the chaos somehow, and this process is strenuous and often extremely painful.

By the time ideas arrive to you as a book or paper or article, it has been processed and ready for convenient consumption.

*

What a delightful, playful object a smartphone is!

How delightful it is to shop at Whole Foods and buy ingredients for our dinner party!

How delightful it is to read ideas, play with them, and to feel inspired to invent one’s own original ideas!

*

We steal gifts when we refuse gratitude — when we just help ourselves to things as if they are just there for the taking.

Our givens have roots.

We should notice when we start taking new givens — new technologies, new services, new inspiration — even new problems…

Those givens aren’t just anonymously deposited upon the earth by reality to be mindlessly consumed.

Look for sources for these good things, and rather than feeling the ache of guilt, try feeling gratitude for the pain someone bore so you didn’t have to.

Ignoring the pain, denying the pain, squinting at the pain, or worst of all, claiming that it all could have come to you without the pain — that is just stealing gifts.

*

I’ve heard that is is better to thank people for their forbearance instead of apologizing for your mistakes. The former produces entangling indebtedness — relationship. The latter, release from responsibility.

*

Then the Jewish Labor Committee Haggadah instructs us to say:

Just as we are dependent upon so many of God’s children, many of whom we will never know, all of God’s children deserve basic dignity, respect and sustenance. With this cup, we recognize and honor our interconnectedness with all people.

Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha-olam borei p’ree hagafen

Blessed are you, Source of all Life, who creates fruit of the vine.

Amen.

Thank you.

Nourishment

Philosophy

Thought nourishes us to the extent that it helps us notice and make sense of the concrete specifics of our lives.

To the degree that our thinking is about other people’s thoughts, and their thoughts are also about other people’s thoughts, the nourishment of thought gets abstracted, processed out.

Most of the  information most of us consume — entertainment, news, editorial, chatter — provides only empty calories, heat without substance.

When we speak as identities we stop being concrete or particular and we lose our ability to nourish others.

When the personal is political we all starve.

Loss and honesty

Biography, Ethics

Jan Zwicky:

Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem — and death, only incidentally and to the extent it is experienced as loss by those who remain alive. The great absolute architectonics of systematic thought are intended to secure the world against loss. Maturity is achieved when things are let go, left to be on their own, allowed their specificity — for when things become most fully themselves, they also become most fully losable. To abandon classical system is to accept, in the sense of comprehend, the ontological necessity of loss. The more precious a thing is, the greater becomes its power to hurt us by simply being absent. We end up ‘leaving each thing as it is’ in two senses of the word ‘leave’.

This is agonizingly true.

I have come to detest self-evasion: abandonment of our first-person post, and flying to the safety of third-person.

I reject treating our unique selves and the unique, irreplaceable, precious people and things we love as mere types or identities.

I refuse to generalize and depersonalize in order to distribute the weight of intense, focused caring out into out speculative views-from-everywhere-at-once, better known as views-from-nowhere, but which I prefer to call views-from-anywhere-but-I.

*

I really, really hate it when people smile down at me from the heights of their wise serenity and assure me that Jesus or the Buddha or Marx or Science or Nature or any other gnostic vendor has washed away all their pain.

As if pain were the mark of insufficient wisdom.

Here is what I want to say to say back:

“If you hurt, please don’t pretend you don’t hurt — that you’ve shed the pain you still plainly carry.

And cut the phony bravado — you are afraid to hurt.

But we are all afraid, and perhaps we ought to be afraid — not because the world is scary and fear is the most intelligent response — but because fear is the honest and decent response of anyone who still loves.

Don’t add the suffering of shame to your pain and your dread of pain. Bear it bravely and honestly.”

Honesty — most of all subjective honesty — unenforceable, voluntary, undisprovable honesty — this is what matters most to me.

Shame is the enemy of subjective honesty.

When I pick up the scent of subjective dishonesty or subjective insensitivity so out of touch with itself that no longer even knows if it is lying or not (only whether a claim is defensible or not), I can no longer do much but feel a sad distance — a distance that only polite kindness can traverse, from one me to another, through a we-less vacuum. You need people, even yourself, to be easy come, easy go.

*

Maybe someday some miraculous epiphany will enter my soul and remove all my pain.

But I promise, I will never, ever pretend to be there until I am actually there.

I will be proud of my subjective honesty until I find something better to be proud of.

*

This is a crucial passage. I love this book.

Filled with birdsong

Biography, Philosophy

I am back to actively conceiving chaos as too many simultaneous orders.

Those orders are there to be selected or filtered, recognized or discognized, to be systematized or articulated or relegated to background noise.

Every enworldment includes and excludes, project, rejects, models, compares.

*

Here is some chaos…

*

Weeks ago, I read a passage that referred to a nightingale’s song. I realized that I had no experience of that song to recall, and that this idea was incomplete. Sadly, all I could connect it to was a passage for Voegelin I read years ago and loved, but which did not move me to listen:

The nightingale still sings its heart-rending, throat-filled song against Death. The significance a musical composition has for me is determined by the degree to which it brings back again this sweet state of anguish between Death and Life.

I found a three-hour video of nightingale song and left it playing for two hours.

Now, I find I’ve lost my ability to tune our birdsong. It is constant and it fills the air with alien intelligence.

This reminds me of an old reflection on participating in Torah study:

In Torah Study, the personalities gathered in the room sparkle against the ground of the text. Insight by insight, the flat black sky deepens into limitless space as it fills up with stars.

Space flooded, saturated with radiant points of intelligibility.

(My friend Callen said that this dispersal of alien intelligence is what pulled him into obsessive birding. I connected this with the memory of an anole, emerald with alarm, skiddling across the road in front of my bike, and wondering about that anole’s intention and experience. Birds multiply these points of intention and experience, and scatter them into the depths of the air, audibly present or absent, whenever we listen out for them.)

This conception makes me feel the inconceivable potentiality of God much more immediately than other more traditional religious notions, but I feel sure that the faith behind this conception is the same — and I want it to be.

Why? I do not want to be alone, neither here nor now.

*

If you think yourself far enough into isolation, you will want to think yourself back to communion. Because you are human.

*

Human beings need to share faith. Sharing faith puts our roots in the soil.

We do not need to share beliefs.

A striving to agree on beliefs can break commonality of faith.

Worship is a matter of faith, and theology is a matter of beliefs.

Let’s stop calling religions “belief systems”.

Let’s stop theorizing about what theory can never comprehend.

Rather, let’s take our place in infinitude and see how much commonality we can radiate.

*

The glory of shared faith is the efflorescence of divergent ideas, ideas that can feel themselves emanating from something shared — in the overlapping harmonizing and intriguingly cacophonizing interpretations of something revered together as transcendent to any one mind.

*

I think I might leave my headphones at home next time I ride my bicycle, and instead bring binoculars.

*

Facts cannot nourish us. Facts about facts about facts positively starve us. Consumer politics, personal politics, the craving for political righteousness is soul pica.

This desperation to feel ourselves to be good people… why? For a time I tried not being a good person. I wanted others to stop finding it so easy to trust me. And I learned from that.

*

Peter Brook, via Jan Zwicky:

When Ted Hughes first came to Paris to a session of our work. we improvised for him on random syllables, then on a piece by Aeschylus. He at once began his own experiments, searching to create first of all roots of language and then what he described as “great blocks of sound.”

From here to Orghast was of course a long and intricate journey. But in taking on the incredible task of inventing a phonetic language, in an odd way Ted Hughes was doing what poets do all the time. Every poet works through several semi-conscious levels – let’s call them A to Z. At level Z energies are boiling mside hun, but they are completely out of the range of his perceptions. At level A they have been captured and shaped into a series of words on paper. In between, at levels from B to Y, the poet is half-hearing, half-makmg syllables that drop in and out of swirls of inner movement. Sometimes, he perceives these prewords and preconcepts as moving forms, sometmies as murmurs, as patterns of sound that are on the brink of words, sometimes as musical values that are becoming recognizable and precise. But in fact, they are not strangers to him — he lives with them all the time. The great originality and daring of Ted Hughes lay in working openly in an area that gained a control and freedom that makes the subsequent Orghast impossible to separate into sense and sound.

So many of us live here.

We can think in the nebulous reality of unformatted ideas.

We can also assemble formatted ideas into new shapes, and there is novelty here, too.

But I am both tormented and intrigued by the ideas that are unrecognized, because they haven’t even yet been cognized — inaccessible even to metaphor, because there is not yet a distinct This to liken to That.

*

We know cities by strands of road. Alongside the road are homes and buildings, each with an interior. My job has brought me to some interiors, where I have been taught new ways to understand by occupants of these secret spaces. I never once heard the birdsong in the yards, but now it is there.

*

There are worlds within the world
Within the world there are worlds
The situation is the universe of man
As the measure of all things
Understand that you are another world in miniature
And that in you there are the sun, the moon and also stars
Man as the messenger of being
By analogy flesh and bones of man derive from earth
His bloody from water, his breath from air
And body heat from fire.

*

The first time I sat in meditation, my mind was filled with random babble.

From time to time, a sound would snap into morphemic recognition, and then roll into a word, a thought, a memory, and then I was no longer observing my breath.

One faintly reminded me of some Star Trek and a vivid image of the U.S.S Enterprise flying through space jolted me back to attention,

*

Truth comes pre-formatted. Truth must be encased in the concepts and logic of the time.

If you do not adopt the format, your nonsense will fall on deaf ears and deafening arguments.

The format is the colosseum. Arm yourself, and prepare for battle. You will die by your confusion.

*

I really, really hate argument. I hate doing it. I hate reading it.

I want to live more “indexically”, as Garfinkel put it.

See?

*

Stop fighting. It is ok to have been wrong. We don’t have to be good. Share faith.

Taste in scales

Biography, Philosophy

Jan Zwicky speaks of resonant relationships among wholes. These wholes are not clarified through analysis, nor are they built up piece by piece through synthesis. In my preferred vocabulary, I would say that they are wholes conceived as given. Their meaning comes not from the atomic bits that compose them, but from the articulate whole that comprises them. The articulations that relationally differentiate participants-within-wholes interpenetrate and crisscross all that is, producing a complex field of possible likeness, each a resonance, a taken-together given.

In the past I have visualized the relationship of the synthesized truth with the conceived truth — of the composed world with the comprised world — of the systematized with the articulate — as an overlaid top-down and bottom-up triangle.

*

This week I have been revisiting an old theme connected with service design: altitude and granularity.

One of the formative intellectual developments of my generation was chaos theory. We came of age when computers became capable of visualizing fractal geometric figures, and when James Gleick’s Chaos was published. For many Gen-X nerds, nonlinearity, the butterfly effect, and scalar self-similarity became part of our basic conceptual equipment at the precise age when nerds self-equip.

So for me, with hours of playing with the Mandelbrot Set in my memory, zooming in and out and noting what wholes and parts come into prominence within a visual field as it is magnified or reduced, altitude and granularity are experience-near concepts and I see them everywhere in everything. And I am seeing them in Zwicky’s observations of resonance.

Every altitude of inquiry produces different salient conceptions.

Imagine specificity and generality of a subject presented in different kinds of text. Compare a detailed ethnomethodological study with a book about ethnomethodology, with a sociology textbook. Each looks upon its subject from a particular altitude, and handles ideas of particular types (a particular case, a specific method, a general field of inquiry), putting them into systematic or articulate relation, each with a certain grain and texture and tone.

I’ve found that my own mind responds well to some altitudes and granularities better than others. They are very precise — I like to understand things up-close and at an interpersonal level. Sweeping histories that do not anchor in individual experience feel unreal to me. But great social trends that can be shown in terms of artistic style are real. I can absorb an aesthetic style and sense the enworldment that produces it. But discussion of social forces and policy conflicts — again unreal. Grand military history — meaningless. Geography defined by ecosystems or by societies subsisting on various natural resources — nebulous and vacant. A survey of the world’s religions — now the entire world is colorfully mapped. Stories of particular people in particular places. Borges snd Casares made Argentina real for me; Ben Okri, Nigeria.

It seems nothing in the world is real to me unless it is refracted through another person’s lived experience. Only enworldments enworld my world.

If information is presented objectively, out of reference from some particular person’s enworldment, it means nothing to me. The only science I care about is the science a real human scientist did — Robert Boyle, Ben Franklin, Lois Pasteur — so, thank you, STS. I cannot see science apart from the stories of people in laboratories or observatories, or working at desks, interacting with equipment a\that provides them obscure clues in the form of messy data, which they, like me, struggle to bring into persuasive order. The persuasive order — the “science” — that is no foundation for making sense of this world we inhabit!

Years ago, Nietzsche consoled me by painting this portrait:

The truly efficient and successful scholars could one and all be described as ’employees’. When in their youth they had perfected their skills and crammed their memories, when hand and eye had acquired certainty, they were directed by an older scholar to a place in science where their qualities would be useful; later on, after they themselves had become accomplished enough to detect the gaps and faults in their science, they posted themselves of their own accord to where they were needed. These natures one and all exist for the sake of science: but there are rarer, rarely successful and wholly mature natures ‘for the sake of whom science exists’ — at least that is what they themselves think — : frequently unpleasant, frequently arrogant, frequently wrong-headed but almost always to a certain extent bewitching men. They are not employees, neither are they employers, they avail themselves of that which these have laboured to ascertain and do so with a certain princely composure and rarely with more than a modicum of praise: as though, indeed, those employees and employers belonged to a lower species of beings. And yet they possess precisely the same qualities as these employers and employees do, and sometimes even in an inferior state of development: they are, moreover, characterized by a narrow limitedness foreign to the former, on account of which it is impossible to appoint them to a post or see in them usable instruments — they can live only in their own atmosphere and on their own soil. This limitedness proffers them all of a science that ‘belongs to them’, that is to say all they can bear home with them to their atmosphere and dwelling; they fancy they are collecting together their scattered ‘property’. If they are prevented from constructing their own nest they perish like houseless birds; unfreedom is phthisis to them. If they cultivate individual regions of science in the way the others do, it is always only those regions where the fruit and seeds they themselves need will prosper; what is it to them if science as a whole has regions untilled and ill cultivated? They lack all impersonal interest in a problem; just as they themselves are personalities through and through, so all their insights and acquirements in the field of knowledge coalesce together into a personality, into a living multiplicity whose individual parts are dependent on one another, cleave to one another, are nourished by the same food, and as a whole possesses its own atmosphere and its own odour. — Natures such as this produce, with their personality-informed structures of knowledge, that illusion that a science (or even the whole of philosophy) is finished and has reached its goal; it is the life in their structure that performs this magic, which has at times been very fateful for science and misleading for those able and efficient workers of the spirit just described, though at other times, when aridity and exhaustion have reigned, it has acted as a balm and like the breath of a cool, refreshing oasis. — The name usually given to such men is philosophers.