Here is why reading Nietzsche is such a strange experience: he plants perplexities in the reader’s head, then signals what he has done a couple dozen pages later. For the last couple of months I’ve been reading Daybreak. I was reading it when I wrote “Designerly virtues”, “Crisis of interspection”, and “Interspecting interverts”. And now I come to these two passages.

174. Moral fashion of a commercial society. — Behind the basic principle of the current moral fashion: ‘moral actions are actions performed out of sympathy for others’, I see the social effect of timidity hiding behind an intellectual mask: it desires, first and foremost, that all the dangers which life once held should be removed from it, and that everyone should assist in this with all his might: hence only those actions which tend towards the common security and society’s sense of security are to be accorded the predicate ‘good’. — How little pleasure men must nowadays take in themselves when such a tyranny of timidity prescribes to them their supreme moral law, when they so uncontradictingly allow themselves to be ordered to look away from themselves but to have lynx-eyes for all the distress and suffering that exists elsewhere! Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections? — In the meantime, the question itself remains unanswered whether one is of more use to another by immediately leaping to his side and helping him — which help can in any case be only superficial where it does not become a tyrannical seizing and transforming — or by creating something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the roadway but also a hospitable gate.

175. Fundamental idea of a commercial culture. — Today one can see coming into existence the culture of a society of which commerce is as much the soul as personal contest was with the ancient Greeks and as war, victory and justice were for the Romans. The man engaged in commerce understands how to appraise everything without having made it, and to appraise it according to the needs of the consumer, not according to his own needs; ‘who and how many will consume this?’ is his question of questions. This type of appraisal he then applies instinctively and all the time: he applies it to everything, and thus also to the productions of the arts and sciences, of thinkers, scholars, artists, statesmen, peoples and parties, of the entire age: in regard to everything that is made he inquires after supply and demand in order to determine the value of a thing in his own eyes. This becomes the character of an entire culture, thought through in the minutest and subtlest detail and imprinted in every will and every faculty: it is this of which you men of the coming century will be proud: if the prophets of the commercial class are right to give it into your possession! But I have little faith in these prophets. Credat Judaeus Apella — in the words of Horace. {“Let the Jew Apella believe it; not I”. The phrase means, roughly, tell it to someone else, not me.}

I indexed these two passages in brain.anomalogue wiki under Commercial culture.

This line of thought was a big reason I chose to return to the work world after my paid vacation working for a university, ruining the lives of professors for the convenience of the university administrative class.

Nietzsche hinted that there were cultural possibilities in wholehearted engagement in commercial activity. If you don’t know how to read him feistily you’ll take him at face value, and swallow the notion that commerce is essentially degrading. But illuminate these observations with his fundamental insight that the origin of human virtue is often unsightly, and even vicious: “Thus here too something moral of the highest sort has blossomed out of a black root.”

I would like to believe, and choose to believe, that design is the virtue (or family of virtues) that has grown out of the calculating timidity of merchants, and that this event deserves to be recognized, celebrated, embraced and put to work on our nastiest, gnarliest, bitterest conflicts.

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“Commercial Reign” is stuck in my head now.

https://youtu.be/LmJxWENBW7Y

I wonder if Susan is in this crowd, since she was part of the Madchester scene at its peak. Then she moseyed over to Berlin to see the wall come down. My wife is a trifecta mystical, cultural and historical badass.

I love how 20th century intellectuals are always making grand generalities about “man”. This formula produces sentences that smell sweet and musty like a yellowing paperback.

“Man is the concept adopting and using animal.”

What have I learned reading millennia of eloquent bellyachers?

Every generation is convinced it is the last because life without self is inconceivable. What we can’t conceive, seems to us, nonexistent: thus, the eternally receding nigh of endtimes.

Every generation longs for the simplicity of earlier days, because all we want to bequeath the future from our hassled present is the relatively simple center, and the simple center of former times is all that is bequeathed to us. The present for everyone at all times is mostly hassling periphery around a tiny, vulnerable, simple center.

We are always stunned by the rapid change of present times, because that is what present times do: they change rapidly. “Ha, you call that rapid change?” says each generation to its stunned ancestors.

Now is always lonely, isolating, alienating. Human life is like this, or at least it is for the kind of person who needs to write.

We are always in a unique predicament. Every epoch, every people, every person: in the uniqueness of our predicament, we are all alike.

In our conviction that I, alone, at the center of my own universe, am in a unique predicament that nobody else can understand, we are all alike.

In our belief that all others must displace themselves and recenter around the absolute center of the universe — we might try to make this happen. Maybe we even should try.

And if life is especially malevolent, it might allow us to succeed for a time.

A friend asked me what I meant by interspection.

By interspection, I mean our attention is neither turned inward toward ourselves, nor outward toward the world, but rather otherward into each other’s inwardness.

Everyone else’s inner life is now everyone’s problem — both their phony public passions they pass off as their subjectivity, and their more authentic personal perspectives they mistake for objectivity.

We’re all interspecting interverts, and we are still pretty horrible at it. We celebrate it as “empathy” but very little of it penetrates beyond our collectively-believed, individually-imagined amateur sociologist fantasies.

Yesterday, I came upon this passage in William Barrett’s Irrational Man:

Yet a great formal style in painting has never been created that did not draw upon the depths of the human spirit, and that did not, in its newness, express a fresh mutation of the human spirit. Cubism achieved a radical ?attening of space by insisting on the two-dimensional fact of the canvas. This ?attening out of space would seem not to be a negligible fact historically if we re?ect that when, once before in history, such a development occurred but in the opposite direction—when the ?atness of the Gothic or primitive painters passed over into the solidity, perspective, and three- dimensional style of early Renaissance painting—it was a mark that man was turning outward, into space, after the long period of introspection of the Middle Ages. Western man moved out into space in his painting, in the fourteenth century, before he set forth into actual physical space in the age of exploration that was to follow. Thus painting was prophetic of the new turn of the human spirit which was eventually to ?nd expression in the conquest of the whole globe. Have we the right, then, to suggest that the ?attening of painting in our own century portends a turning inward of the human spirit, or at any rate a turning away from that outer world of space which has hitherto been the ultimate arena of Western man’s extroversion?

…The subjectivity that is generally present in modern art is a psychological compensation for, sometimes a violent revolt against, the gigantic externalization of life within modern society. The world pictured by the modern artist is, like the world meditated upon by the existential philosopher, a world where man is a stranger.

When mankind no longer lives spontaneously turned toward God or the supersensible world… the artist too must stand face to face with a ?at and inexplicable world.

Do we still feel like strangers to ourselves? Do we still recoil from a “gigantic externalization of life within modern society”? I don’t think so, but mostly because most of us were born into a nearly complete state of alienation, have never known anything else and consequently we have no contrasting state of being with which we can compare our own.

I would argue that the analogue to extraverted exploration or introverted introspection most conspicuously and painfully present in our time is interspection — a crisis of intimacy.

In our time, largely due to social media (sorry for this boring, but true analysis), a person’s inner self is subjected to an unprecedented level of external exposure and scrutiny, both in voluntary expression and involuntary behavioral monitoring and increasingly sophisticated means of linking, tracking and analysis. At the same time, a self is assailed and buffeted by other people’s personal expressions, spoken with sincerity cranked to the maximum — heartfelt responses to tragedy, anguished pain cries from assorted microagressions, agitated responses to these social phenomena from rando bloggers amped-up on ungodly doses of yerba mate.

Even the news is infused with a standard opining and emoting. All journalism is gonzo journalism now, even when the journo subjectivity admixed into the story, far from spicing it and tilting the perspective dilutes it and locks it into a standardized, redundantly radical viewpoint.

And at work, matters are even worse. Rather than leaving our controversial opinions at home, as etiquette once required, we are now encouraged to bring our opinions “authentic selves” to work — at least selves selected from the list of recognized identities. Unique selves require far too much effort to understand, and tend to strain busy peoples’ patience. From time to time these select authentic selves are invited/required to ritualistically confront one another in encounters that are intentionally “uncomfortable” and to affirm the necessity and goodness of the ritual and the social theory that prescribes it.

And, at least in the rapidly-expanding design world, teams are plunged into resolving problems of human understanding, unknown 20 years ago. These problems are pushed to the edges of comprehensibility, because these are the extremes that yield innovation. This kind of deep working produces a completely different kind of intimacy crisis than those of social media, editorialized news, workplace authenticity and the like, all of which are counterfeit intimacy performed by social actors whose whose selfhood is eclipsed by role and buried beneath layers of personae — or what was known in existentialist circles as “bad faith”.

It is no coincidence that design’s intersubjective intimacy occurs precisely where people are trying their best to be objective by directing their mind away from who they think they are toward what the think they are not. Ironically, here is where we encounter the raw realness of fellow-souls, in the schematic interference of divergent conceptualizations and those intuitions we resort to when our conceptual schema fail us.

We seek our selfhood in the object at the center of our own experience, which is exactly the wrong place to look for self. Self is more vividly present everywhere but there, especially in times when that egoic object is such a matter of concern that it is smothered in image.

This is why Pinterest is the only social medium where selves can be found. Everywhere else is just persona propaganda.

“The chief moral commandments which a people is willing to be taught and have preached at it again and again are related to its chief failings, and thus it is never bored by them. The Greeks, who all too frequently failed to evidence moderation, cold courage, fair-mindedness or rationality in general, were glad to give ear to the four Socratic virtues — for they had such need of them and yet so little talent for them!”

This is definitely true of me and my designerly virtues. I’ve struggled my whole adult life to acquire these bits of discipline — while simultaneously taking care to not smother out the vicious intensity beneath these virtues that is the true power source of my productivity. Right now, I’m reading Nietzsche to counterbalance my virtues, and it is making me much harder to get along with.

I added a phronesis entry to Designerly virtues.

Phronesis — Phronesis is tacit know-how acquired through hands-on experience. Being tacit, phronesis doesn’t always lend itself to explicit language, but rather, demonstrates itself in practice. When people who understand theory very clearly and who can explain it eloquently, struggle to apply that theory effectively and to adjust their methods to fit contingencies, phronesis is what is lacking. Another reason phronesis is important is “intuitive” design harnesses existing or easily-acquired phronesis to enable users to skillfully interact with a system without having to explicitly figure out or memorize how. Phronesis complements theory with tacit skills that enable mastery of theoretical and physical systems as well as effective improvisation where explicit methods are not available.

If I didn’t already own a copy of Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines, I’d have to buy it, if only to house this quote in my library:

As phenomena to be studied, discoveries are interesting, but forgettings are profound. Through the one, we explore and celebrate our insights, but through the other we discover our blindness. It is only through the encounter with a reality that we could not perceive that we see the limitations of our perception—and so begin the slow process of transcending them.