Bronwen: “When I limited myself to one abstract noun per sentence, the clarity of my writing improved ten-thousand percent. If it ends in -ion or -ism or -ity, be ruthless. Find another way. It’s like taking a squeegee to a dirty window.”
Me: “But I’m writing philosophy. The stuff I read and write is all ismionity.”
But you know, now I’m thinking about the best philosophical writers. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein wrote with minimal ismionity.
I may need to learn to write more ismionitilessly.
Philosophy is a seriously annoying pursuit. You put in many hours every day for years on end to understand things more comprehensively and clearly. And after you’ve done this work, and have developed an understanding that’s a clear and comprehensive enough to be worth sharing, those you’d like to share it with see it as arrogant that you might think your understanding is any clearer or comprehensive than the one they’ve casually picked up and adopted, and never given much thought to.
Whine, whine, whine.
Lately, one of the conservative public intellectuals I follow and respect, Jonah Goldberg, has been talking a lot about tradeoffs, and how conservatives seem to him to be more willing to accept them, in contrast to progressives seem unable to accept tradeoffs.
I see some truth in this, but I don’t think it is true enough. I’d put it this way:
Conservatives are conscious that tradeoffs are inevitable and always to some degree necessary, and, consequently are more likely to see present tradeoffs as being necessary ones, or at least preferable to tradeoffs that might be made under alternative arrangements.
Progressives are conscious that, while trade-offs are inevitable and always to some degree necessary, that degree can differ, and are therefore more inclined to ask whether present tradeoffs are optimal, and if an alternative arrangement might require fewer tradeoffs – especially from those who have little control over these arrangements and who often end up bearing much of the burden of the off-trading.
This doesn’t mean progressives cannot make tradeoffs, or that they see every tradeoff as abhorrent, it only means they are always aware something else might be better. And conservatives are there to remind progressives that while an alternative might be better, it might be a lot worse, in ways impossible to anticipate until it is too late.
Illiberals are the ones who abhor tradeoffs. They have undue faith in their own convictions and logic, and cannot imagine how they might be wrong. They fail to ask themselves if incapacity isn’t a defect of their imagination, rather than evidence. They believe with all their hearts that if they could impose their wills on reality that reality would conform to their expectations, and everyone would see that they were right all along– that they are on the right side of history. Of course, the conviction one is on the right side of history is the furthest thing from evidence that this is actually so. But illiberalism is, at bottom, a conviction-actuality confusion, unlearned only through the hardest life-lessons, and often unlearned too late.
I’m falling back two hours and setting my biological clock to Stephen Savings Time so I can do writing as a near full-time job. This means my evenings will start winding down at 7:30pm so I can be up and ready to clock in at 4:30am.
Until I get this done, I will be saying “no” to a lot of invitations. Please do not take this, or the rest of my monomania, personally.
*
Writing this book is inspiring me return to many older ideas, to recall them, recollect them, and to reintegrate them into a clearly conceived unity. The process is forcing me to prioritize what I include, and, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, make exclusions. This pruning and shaping is cleansing. I’ve accumulated a lot of ideas and associations, some fully comprehended and internalized, some only synthetically known about, but not intrinsic to how I think. Writing is forcing me to make distinctions between what is essential, and what is dispensable, and I am feeling it not only in my mind, but in my heart and my body.
*
Much of what I am recollecting is from the early days of my life-changing encounter with Nietzsche, so he is freshly on my mind. His words are especially resonant now, especially these:
Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!
After spending one week writing as my pretend full-time job I can say this: Writing is like working on a zillion-sided rubic’s cube, where solving one facet scrambles all the rest 100% of the time.
Susan has been accepted into a Vipassana course, and now she is contemplating what she has gotten into. She keeps trying to imagine what it will be like.
I keep telling her it is impossible to imagine. The first time I went, in 1997, everything I anticipated was irrelevant to what actually happened. It didn’t even occur to me to imagine what turned out to be most important.
But strangely, what is most important in the experience seems impossible to remember.
I know this only because, registering for my second course, I tried again to anticipate what it would be like, this time with the benefit of experience, but, once again was shocked at how different the reality was from the anticipation, and additionally shocked at my inability to anticipate. The third time, I tried to factor the shock into my anticipation, and that also failed. It was the same with all subsequent courses.
The actual experience of Vipassana is never anything like even the most informed anticipations of it.
Perhaps our memories record only certain aspects of experience.
*
Another strange thing about Vipassana concerns time. Time behaves extremely strangely when you are deeply absorbed and have no visual and few auditory reference points. The passing of fifteen minutes is difficult to discern from an hour. The impulse to look at a clock and to get reoriented within time can become very distracting.
My Jewish view on this is that eternity can be very uncomfortable before you get used to it.
*
The strangest part of Vipassana is the question of agency. I sit down determined to observe my breath for a full hour, to keep my attention focused solely and entirely on the sensation of in-breath, out-breath. I’m observing it, observing it, observing it – then I’m not. And not only am I not now, I haven’t been observing for some time. Who stopped observing? Where was I? I was not there.
This insight hit me hard at my first course, and it arrived with a depression. I’d wasted ten days of my life, doing everything wrong. It took a day of intense meditation, observing the physical sensations of depression, for it to break apart and dissipate.
Eventually, I adjusted to the insight that our own being is intermittent. We pop into and out of existence all the time.
This is easily explained away if you need to. Our default objectivist orientation is amply-equipped to subdue every trace of the profound strangeness of existence with materialist just-so stories. But I know what it’s like to be dead.
*
Susan asked me: Do you suppose you got more from Vipassana than you know?
I think I did. But what I gained was not primarily information. It was something quite different.
What I got was an inclination to notice things about our own subjectivity that doesn’t play nice with how we normally think.
For instance, I was able to observe that when we are around some other people, aspects of our subjectivity dissociate from ourselves, and connect up with corresponding aspects of another other, so that there is more subjective cohesion between two people than within either person. We notice this most in love, but it happens all the time.
When we become jealous, we can feel the cohesion we have someone else – someone with whom we are someone – being strained by an interfering coherence they are forming with a stranger. We can feel in our hearts an existential threat, because this other with whom we are ourselves, is becoming estranged from us as they become someone different with this stranger. Part of the ground of our very self quakes and shifts, and we feel jealous.
Viewing this situation from an objectivist perspective, we must explain away jealousy as an attempt to possess another person. But when we understand subjectively, we can see better that we are only trying to maintain our own conditions of belonging.
Subjects are not what we think they are. We are not what we think we are.
Anatta: not-self.
*
Before I went to Vipassana, I had a lot of ideas about what might I might undergo, what it might be like, and what might happen to me.
After going several times, I let go of many of these things, but I had nothing to replace it with. I still found it impossible to conceptualize what might happen, and so I could only participate and try to remain receptive.
It took many years to see that this concept-suspending participation was itself a mode of understanding – an alternative to objective comprehension.
Constantly translating the uncanny experiences of Vipassana back into the terms of the objectivist philosophy I held at the time, in order to make them comprehensible and compatible with conventional thought would have filtered out precisely the strangest and most consequential insights.
I could have said “Yeah, I keep forgetting how hard this is.”
I could have said “Yeah, you really lose your sense of time sitting there.”
I could have said “Yeah, we are just so absent-minded and so distractible.”
I could have said “Yeah, love makes us lose our minds.”
But I didn’t. I did my best to do full justice to what I experienced.
I reformed how I conceived truth to accommodate my experiences, rather than forcing my experiences to fit inside my existing conceptions. Rather than taming my strange experiences with conventional scientistic or spiritual explanations, I gave them a new environment.
At dawn, my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
With no attempts 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
Any form of participation in a whole experienced solely from within (in which the participant participates as a part) of which we have only partial knowledge is, in itself inconceivable. Withinness topologically thwarts comprehension.
We cannot conceive the whole, but we can conceive the fact that we are participants in it, and we can conceive many characteristics of our participation. For instance, we can conceive things we might do or think or feel in response to our immediate encounter with fellow participants or parts within the whole. We can conceive that the whole exists, that we are situated within it, that it environs us, and we can understand how we participate in that whole as a part of it, even if we do not comprehend the whole in the conceptual way we comprehend objects in our environment or other kinds of things we can wrap our minds around.
We might even try to map what we are able to conceive from within and try to make what we are within conceivable.
For instance, if we are trapped in a labyrinth, we might draw a maze map that represents, from the outside, the space we are inside, so we can better comprehend it as a whole instead of as a connected series of situations. We transpose the multiple interior positions to a single exterior form. We evert it, and what remains inside now views an exterior representation of its situation and mentally re-situates itself outside.
We might even get so absorbed in the maze that we forgets that it we still located in some space within the labyrinth and not on some dot marked on the maze, in the same way as we forget that our brain is something known by the mind, not the other way around.
*
The first all-consuming perplexity I experienced reading Nietzsche resolved in an image of a mandala.
At the zenith of the mandala was a point I labeled “Solipse”. At the nadir was another point labeled “Eclipse”.
Next to Solipse I wrote “World-in-me” and drew a little circle with a dot at its center, with a caption “Ptolemy”.
Next to Eclipse I wrote “I-in-world” and drew another little circle with a dot on the periphery with a caption “Copernicus”.
In solipse, brains are found inside minds, along with every known thing. In eclipse, minds are produced from brains which exist at points in space.
This was the origin of my topological sense of understanding.
The perpendicular points between solipse and eclipse marked inflections between these two everted ways to situate self and world, moments where both situations become conceivable, perhaps together in ambinity, and for a time neither fully dominates, but co-exist in all-everting multistability.
From these two points we can see most clearly how the inside of an oyster shell is an everted pearl, Pandora’s box is everted Paradise, and Eden is the everted fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Here we can conceive both ultimate eversions simultaneously. We can use maps without forgetting where that map really is, but also move around in space and allow maps to deepen our understanding of our situation. Our minds are improved with knowledge of brains, but our knowledge of brains is improved knowing that all knowledge is mind-product.
Much later, moving along this wheel, at one of these ambinity points where inside and outside exist within one another, I intuited a beyondness of both, a ground of soliptic-ecliptic eversion that is both and neither. From that point on, I was religious.
*
At the beit din before I went into the mikvah a rabbi interrupted me in the middle of an answer to one of their questions, and asked “Do you even really believe in God?” I said, “Yes; but in a way that is extremely difficult to explain.” She said “Very Jewish. Fair enough.” Fifteen minutes later I emerged from the mikvah a Jew with a new Hebrew name, Nachshon, after the general of the tribe of Judah who, according to legend, waded into the chaotic turbulence of the Red Sea all the way up to his nostrils, just before Moses split the waters into two halves, permitting passage from one shore to the other. Adonai eloheinu; Adonai echad.
*
I need to think carefully how I might use the word “participate” in my topological conceptive vocabulary, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is built around con-capere words.
Participate shares the same root as concept, conception, conceive: capere “take”
part- “part” + –capere “take” – to part-take.
con- “together” + -capere “take” – to together-take.
I am designing a vocabulary for discussing how understanding works, with special emphasis on the relationship between existing understandings, failures of understanding (perplexities), and extremely novel understandings (epiphanies).
All my subjects of interest — design, philosophy and religion — are urgently concerned with epiphanies. But each is concerned with epiphanies for different reasons, pays attention to different aspects of epiphanies and consequently uses different language to talk about epiphanies.
Of course these are three vast subjects each filled with diverse and conflicting views and goals, but they do have common family resemblances, and I will venture to make some generalizations about the role epiphanies play in each, to show what I, personally, have taken from my encounters.
In design, there are two places where epiphanies occur, first, in the effort to understand the people for whom we design and how this helps us conceive our design problem, and, second, in determining a solution to the design problem. Often the social nature of design is both the source of trouble, but also the impetus required to reach novel ways of seeing. A concept capable of synthesizing complicated, heterogeneous data and considerations into a single elegant unity capable of being understandable, inspiring and useful to a large number of collaborators — while still doing full justice to the reality being conceptualized — is beyond the capacity of any one mind, who will almost always trade off certain important consideration in the effort to resolve the problem. But all minds looking in their own partial and particular way will check the hasty trade-offs of individuals and force effort along channels nobody would ever go if working alone – to the dismay of all involved, but to the benefit of the solution that is eventually conceived. Epiphanies in design research are usually called insights and epiphanies in solution development are called innovations. And for designers, the emphasis is usually on what techniques can be used to get the deepest insights to produce the most “impactful” and differentiating innovations, less on the particular solution (which is more a proof-point of the method’s and/or practitioner’s effectiveness) or on the theory of what an epiphany is, or how it happens or what it is like to make it happen). Intellectual designers are most often methods geeks.
In philosophy (or at least the variety I read which tends to sit in the region between existentialism and pragmatism) is absorbed in its thought content. It struggles with assertions, arguments, metaphors, definitions, logic and struggles to resolve whatever is bothering it. In this strenuous effort, philosophers occasionally have exciting breakthroughs that allow them to rethink these assertions, arguments, metaphors, definitions and logic — or to find new ways to defend their old ones against those seeking to rethink them. Usually, the emphasis leans strongly toward the objects of thought, not the subject having the thought, so most epiphanies are characterized as new concepts or fruitful new approaches to thinking about concepts. But unlike design, there is nearly no emphasis on methods. Philosophy specifically scents out places where effective methods either break down or have never existed. Wittgenstein said it best: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about'”, that is, in perplexities. Finding that way about – making a perplexity intelligible – often arrives in an epiphany. This is the part of philosophy so indispensable to understanding epiphanies: they are reliably found in the urgent struggle with perplexing content. But if a philosopher is transformed in the struggle with perplexity or in the epiphany that resolves it, this in normally excluded from the philosophy itself, unless the philosopher is some weirdo outlier like Nietzsche.
Finally, we have religion. I won’t even try to generalize about religion, because it is entirely about effecting personal transformations, using ideas and myriad other symbolic forms, that in turn effect transformations of how religion is conceived. But these transformations are brought about through epiphanies of varying depths. The deepest epiphanies are called various things in different traditions — metanoia, nibbana, enlightenment, satori, liberation, rebirth, etc. — and fundamentally change our relationship with the infinite ground of being in ways all agree are impossible to talk about in straightforward terms. So with religion, epiphanies make use of and produce ideas, and also use techniques that induce epiphanies, but the real purpose of it all is self-transformation.
All three of these epiphanic subjects bring something important to the understanding of the general phenomenon of epiphanies. Design brings an understanding of methods and conditions useful for generating epiphanies, and specifically ones that appeal to a range of people. It also, for those alert to it, provides first-hand experience with social situations where an epiphany is urgently needed but remains inconceivable until the moment it arrives. Philosophy shows how struggling with perplexing material is fertile ground for inducing epiphanies. Religion brings the subject of epiphany into the picture, showing how epiphanies and self-transformation go together and enable new and inconceivable kinds of understanding as well as new experiences of the world and new relationships with what transcends our understanding.
Once I put together these pieces and saw them all as facets of the same phenomenon, I began to notice their features in one another.
In design, those conditions that produce epiphanies are also the ones that induce perplexities. The perplexities are hidden or downplayed by people who want to market design as an inspiring creative activity, and sometimes it is even techniqued out of existence, using mechanical processes that yield very defensible but very uninspiring facts about users, or which use careful organization of features and content as compensation for a unifying concept. But the most inspired design is simple and radical, and this inevitably involves navigating perplexity with the antimethods of philosophy. And people are transformed by this process when it is done successfully, both individually and as groups.
With philosophy, design provides interesting insights into how philosophy pervades everyday life and might improve it at the level of how we think. Watching teams struggle to make sense of a practical perplexity until an epiphany delivers a way to think and “move around” in the problem, and watching how team members clash and “storm” until an epiphany allows them to “norm” around a common understanding of the problem, so they can then collaboratively “perform” raises the epic question of whether many other irresolvable problems aren’t really undiagnosed philosophical problems. Religion’s self-reflective focus contributes to philosophy by asking questions about how the condition of one’s subjectivity contributes to what material is unintelligible, and whether the epiphanies of philosophy don’t operate on the subject as well as on the understanding of the material. It certainly does seem to be the case, if one is open to it, that a philosophical epiphany does enable a subject to conceive and perceive new truths in reality.
Finally, with religion, both design and philosophy supply mundane examples of epiphany and conversion experiences that challenge some of the traditional imagery associated with religion that are off-putting to many secular modern people. We get a chance to see minor world transfiguration, death-and-rebirths, dark nights of the soul, we even get to hold hands and walk on top of chaos without sinking and drowning in it. These experiences provide new access to religious modes of understanding, without flattening, disenchanting or diminishing what makes religion so important to so many people by reducing it to merely sociological, psychological, aesthetic, ethical or political terms. Instead it expands the other fields and invests them with some of the sacred dignity of religion.
*
So, believe it or not, all that was background for what I really want to discuss, which, if you can remember back to the beginning, concerns the design of a vocabulary that can be used 1) to bring out these features of epiphany, perplexity and everyday relatively untroubled understanding across all three domains equally well, 2) in a way that emphasizes their commonality over their differences and, hopefully, 3) enriches the sense of what’s going on with epiphany, perplexity and understanding in each of them. I can attest that it has for me, but this is my baby, and I’ve been told more than once that my baby looks far prettier to me than to others.
So the vocabulary is built around a simple subject, verb, object sentence: Conceptions conceive concepts.
Concept designates any particular way of taking-together of anything as a unity.
Conceiving designates an act of taking-together as a unity.
Conception designates a subjective capacity to take-together in some particular way.
It’s exactly the same relationship between any faculty, the use of the faculty and its object. Sight sees object. Without sight, there is no seeing visible objects even if they are there for others to see. Hearing hears sounds. Without a sense of hearing, no sound is heard even if a sound is there for others to hear. Without the appropriate conception, a concept is not conceived, even if it is there for others to conceive.
What makes conceptions fascinating is that they can be acquired, where sensory faculties cannot. Nobody has ever made a blind man see, but people have helped people without a particular key conception acquire it, enabling them to conceive what was inconceivable, which is experienced a lot like being blind but suddenly living in a world of sights. New conceptions make new realities appear from nothingness, ex nihilo.
All these words are based on the same root words. Con- together + -capere ‘take’. We could say a together-takability takes-together together-takings, but that would definitely earn me postmortem exile to whatever infernal ring of hell Heidegger is broiling in, and I’d hate to have to listen to that blowhard antisemite eternally trying, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, each time more opaquely than the last, to match the brilliance of Being and Time. “Conceptions conceive concepts” already has me on the watch list, and I’ll be lucky to clear purgatory within a billion years.
The big question is whether we need this word “conception”. What is it for? Why can’t we do without it. My short answer is that when we try to do without it, we end up using it anyway but in sneakier, less graceful forms.
Let’s run through how the language is used:
When we encounter something we do not understand, this is because we can’t conceptualize it. It is a jumble of elements without form. It is chaos. Usually, we just filter chaos out as noise, nonsense or something for someone else to deal with. We do this all the time, and we’re used to doing it. We don’t understand but it’s irrelevant.
Sometimes the right concept is just elusive, and if we give the matter a little thought we figure it out. We try understanding a few ways (that is we try some concepts that seem applicable) and then it comes to us what is going on. The concept was there in our heads and was lurking in the problem, we just didn’t match it up quickly. In some intuitive way we sensed we had what it took to make sense of it. Both the problem and the solution were conceivable. Other times the problem is just complex and requires coordinated use of concepts. We tinker, piece together the solution, then see a concept in the whole that unites the concepts into a clear, coherent system. We built up to the concept bit by bit, then recognize a concept in the form of the whole. Or sometimes someone explains the situation or makes an analogy that brings the right concept to mind and they show us the answer. None of these situations are ones where this vocabulary is terribly useful. These are conventional ah-ha moments.
But sometimes we are faced with something we don’t understand, and we cannot avoid trying to understand it. It might be something that’s gotten under our skin, and we don’t know what to do with it. Or external circumstances might force it upon us. We have to make sense of it, but there is no sense to make. We struggle and struggle, fruitlessly. We try out every angle we know, every problem-solving move in our repertoire, but nothing works. We still can’t even say what the problem is, much less make progress solving the unintelligible the mess we are facing. We’re banging our head against an unyielding wall. This is a perplexity. We get desperate, and experiment more and more wildly, grope in the dark, thrash about. We obsess, and turn the problematic aspects and salient features of the perplexity about in our heads and see if they form any kind of constellation.
What is going on here, in my parlance, is that we lack a conception that makes the problem conceivable and conducive to conceptualization (that is . Why don’t we just say we lack the concept needed to conceive the problem and solution? We could, but what if what is perplexing us is a concept? What if we are wrestling with a concept that someone we trust told us makes perfect sense, but we’re at a total loss to understand it ourselves? We lack a concept to understand the concept?
Then you might ask whether we might use the word understanding, instead. We lack the understanding of the concept. But then, if we lack understanding of a perplexity, doesn’t this mean we lack an understood concept to use to resolve the perplexity and render it intelligible?
My language works far better. A conception is what is lacking — a conceptive capacity to conceive — to abstract an intelligible concept from the chaotic content which permits that content to be comprehended conceptually.
And that same conception is at work when the epiphany regarding the perplexity also conceives the concept in many other places, sometimes in forms that are not immediately recognizably the same. The truths just appear from nowhere. If we do recognize the same concept at work we might show it by making an analogy. This analogy will make sense to anyone who has the conception, and will be perplexing to anyone who lacks it. They’ll literally have no conception, and it will be inconceivable how the two examples are analogous.
Again we can say someone who understands the concept, can “get” the analogy, but all you’re doing now is smuggling a more ungainly synonym for conception back into the formula. You haven’t gotten by with a different structure, you’ve just swapped words (and in my opinion, downgraded them) without gaining anything. “An analogy makes sense to anyone who understands the concept, but will perplex anyone who does not.” There is always a capacity to conceive, understand, whatever, and where the capacity is lacking, the conception or understanding fails to happen.
I’m also going to develop this notion of conception, conceiving and concepts into a redescription of subjectivity and objectivity.
I’m going to treat understanding a subject as developing a capacity to conceive objectivity in a particular way. And I’m going to point out that this is as true for a personal subject as an academic subject. If I understand my wife, Susan, that means that I can conceive the way she conceives and be able to construe the objective truth she will see in most situations. Likewise, if I understand calculus, I learn to conceive a domain of math problems and to understand how it makes objective sense of the world in one particular way. In a situation calling for calculus, I’ll see the applications for using calculus concepts even before I’m consciously remembering formulas.
But all too often we confuse our own objective truths pertaining to Susan’s subjectivity, generating all kinds of metadata about what she does and says, or what her motivations might be, or monitoring her brain activity and claiming this is understanding her. This definitely produces some kinds of truth, but it is not understanding Susan.* We are trying to form concepts referring to Susan’s mind, when we need to be adopting conceptions with which we can conceive the conceptual world Susan inhabits, enabling us to redescribe things as she does, and to perform actions she will perceive as wonderful.
All this is what people very crudely indicate when they talk about empathy, but what they end up focusing on is trying to figure out what feelings the other person is probably having and then having their own feelings about those feelings, because feelings are subjective. It’s hopelessly misconceived, and I plan to set things right.
We’re always concept-mongering when we ought to be figuring out and adopting conceptions, and we rely too heavily on the conceptions we already have, even when there are clear signs they are inadequate.
Speaking of inadequate conceptions, I’m starting to crap out after almost 12 hours of writing, so I’ll stop now.
The sole reason we are not all on a permanent acid trip is because we are so good at fending off infinitude with sanity.
Sanity is a miracle.
We’re just so good at performing the miracle of sanity that only failures of the miracle seem miraculous!
Susan and I are having a very fruitful conversation today. She just told me to post something I said to her:
Most of the brokenness in the world today is caused by bad interactions between people.
People leave these bad interactions feeling drained and dispirited, sensing that they lost more than they gained.
Polycentric design is the practice of redesigning these interactions (or the contexts and conditions of the interactions), so that interactions work out for everyone involved. Somehow each person gains more than they put in.
Good polycentric design produces stone soup effects.
When I finish the book I’m working on now, which zero people will read, I’m writing Polycentric Design, which I hope several dozen people might read.
Susan just read the latest rewrite of the introduction of my book, and made a remarkable observation about ideologies. Her response was to this passage:
Unfortunately, the progress I made understanding texts with obscure meanings was gained at the expense of the understandability of my own thoughts, which were becoming obscure and poetic. I found that my most significant insights, the ones most central to the metanoia, were almost impossible to speak about directly and explicitly. They were expressed most naturally in practical responses to concrete problems, in how I framed problems and how I thought them through. If I tried to talk about these insights directly, I was at a loss for words and was forced to resort to analogies or images. Whatever it was that I had learned from Nietzsche, it was not primarily new thought content, but something else that took years to pin down with language.
Susan pointed out that where my metanoia experience opened me up to new insights that I could not directly express with language, the people she knows who have experienced ideological conversions seem to undergo precisely the opposite: they are given language to account for their (mostly negative) experiences and these accounts close them to new insights.
Since January 2003, the longest I’ve gone without reading was one day, and that was rare. If I ever went even two days, I don’t remember it.
I’m now deep into my third week of waking up before dawn and just writing.
This is a strange shift for me.
We casually imagine our souls to be human-shaped. They are not. They vary in shape, scope and density. They are universe-shaped. Our souls are what we mean when we say “everything” and that is why they vary in size.
This is what we mean when we speak of great souls and small souls.
What can your soul accommodate?
Try to conceive an infinitely accommodating soul.
I bought an old MacBook Air from my daughter and installed Ubuntu on it, so I could experiment with a (mostly) non-Apple platform. I am happy to report that writing on this MacBuntu is the next best thing to typing on a typewriter, in terms of distractions. Ubuntu’s lack of integration with messaging platforms is the furthest thing from a drawback.
I take it as a very good sign when my motivation for writing shifts from a need to articulate something to intense greed to own the book I’m writing. This happened with Geometric Meditations, and it is happening again with this new longer book. I just added a glossary of terms that has crystallized the entire book for me. It is clear, coherent, comprehensive and diamond-hard.
By the way, I am entertaining a new possible title: Topology of Conception.
Design research is tormented by rigor anxiety. There is a sense that design research is a bastard child of the social sciences; that what we do is a sloppy approximation of what anthropologists, behavioral scientists, social or cognitive psychologists do correctly. We feel that maybe because we must work so rapidly or with limited resources, we sort of do things a slightly wrong way. Or maybe our design educations omitted some technical know-how or esoteric theoretical knowledge that real social scientists have.
This anxiety is compounded by a phobia of bias and a fetishization of anti-bias techniques purported to neutralize or counter-balance these biases. Scientific techniques are understood to be our best hope for undoing these subjective biases that distort objectivity, by selectively noticing, ignoring and twisting what we think we perceive to play nice with our own preconceptions, preferences and cognitive predispositions.
I’d like to challenge this view — or at least the social-scientistic remedy part — and to point out that differences in purpose, funding and form of output make academic social science and design research as different as they are alike, and that each genre of research achieves rigor in its own way.
I’m already getting bored with this post, so I’ll make it really damn quick.
Most academic social science work is done with the goal of contributing new knowledge to the field. The work’s ultimate form of output is a paper published in some kind of juried academic journal. The key success indicator is how many other social scientists find the paper valuable enough that they cite it in their published papers. But in order for any of this to happen, the knowledge must be defensible, if not unassailable. Otherwise, the paper is less likely to be selected and published. If it is published, it will meet even more challenges, as other academics test it and attempt to discredit it with their own critiques or research. It is a high-stakes game, and the game is played in single-shots. An academic must be rigorous to make the work stand, and also to show that the work deserves attention, so it makes a lot of sense to take time, do everything possible to remove doubts, uncertainties and soft spots vulnerable to attack.
Let’s call this kind of rigor “single-shot rigor”.
Designers on the other hand, are often forced to show results days into their research. Stakeholder are impatient to see progress and evidence that the work will produce value. Others in the organization clamor to get something useful as early as possible. Directional truth is sometimes very useful, especially when an organization’s general direction is in question. For design researchers, usefulness is most important, and unassailability is valuable only to the point where the research will be assailed at that particular point in its lifestyle. But that point is not single-shot. There will be more points, not only in the research, but also in whatever work the research informs. Everything is, as designers say, “wet clay”, moldable and adaptable, open to further learning as it is applied. (To extend this clay analogy, academic social sciences fire their work in the kiln of publication, and if it is pressed too far, it shatters.) Only when the final product is released, and this is true only for some kinds of products (like material products), most stay pliable after release (like software and services).
But also, because design research is fast and relatively cheap, it can be done iteratively, with each cycle informing different stages of the design’s development, each building on and stress-testing the previous iterations. This means that any misunderstanding or oversight in one cycle of research will be discovered in a future cycle. For instance, if a need of a user or customer is misinterpreted during foundational research (research used to help teams understand the people and contexts where a design intervention might be useful), when the insights from foundational research are applied in the design of generative research (research used to produce innovative concepts for design interventions) or evaluative research (research used to assess the usefulness and desirability of design interventions) omissions and misconceptions will be brought to light. Through successive cycles of learning and application, each cycle slightly less open-ended and formally exact than the last, the research gets more and more complete, specific and certain.
So, let’s call design research’s rigor “iterative rigor”.
Given infinite time and resources, perhaps one-shot rigor could have some value of a certain kind, but that time and those resources might be more wisely used adding more iterations. But also — especially in early stages of design research where research is used to inspire intuitive leaps into unknown possibilities — premature rigor can introduce trade-offs against innovation by closing off the intuitive hunches, reckless speculation and informed imagination that make it possible. Here, trading off possible opportunities for certainty is unwise.
A friend of mine reminded me of a quip I made a couple of months ago: “The most revolutionary thing that you can do these days is modulate your passions.”
I am trying to write a post, but it keeps expanding and extending under its own power.
It is displacing my reading. I am waking up and just writing.
I hope this is my book.
If this is the book I end up writing, my old working title, The Ten-Thousand Everythings would be the natural choice.
Susan and I worked out a schema of attitudes toward otherness:
Yang Earth is inclined to understand truth Earth-upward.
Yang Heaven is inclined to understand truth Heaven-downward.
Yang Man is inclined to understand truth Man-outward.
*
My pragmatic phenomenological re-interpretation of Guenon is a yang Man interpretation of a yang Heaven truth.
Before you listen to me, though, be sure to consult the I Ching, and see what it has to say about the trigram, K’an, the Abysmal, the world viewed from yang Man.