All posts by anomalogue

Escape

Fables, myths & parables

A prisoner was isolated in a cell with nothing but a cot, a chamberpot and a footlocker. It was a mystery to him why he was given a footlocker. He had nothing to put in it except one change of underwear and a spare pair of socks.

He had nothing to do all day except dream of escape. How this could be accomplished was even more mysterious, for there was no door or windows in his cell, just six inner surfaces — six directions teasing infinite extension, halted by impassable cinderblock.

He did not know how thick the cinderblock walls were. Dayless and nightless eternity, stretching onward without end, but without access to future or past, persuaded him that the cinderblock extended infinitely in all directions.

One day the two mysteries — the inescapable cell, the pointless footlocker — became one, and he had his answer. The prisoner climbed into his footlocker, closed the lid and achieved the impossible.

Jack going to sleep

Biography

The whole family watched Jack put himself to sleep last night on the baby monitor. He seemed to be reviewing his day, drowsily chattering about cars and fire trucks and bicycles. He spent a few moments on the matter of Shoshi’s bike, which he pronounces with a nasally “Hngm-Hngm’s byckle.” Then he started singing. “Car, car, truck. Car, car, Mimi’s car. Car, car, dog.” We watched him until he dropped off into sleep, and shared a hanging sadness that was not disappointment when his song stopped.

No more summer vacation

Biography

After graduating from college and entering the adult world of full-time employment, I remember feeling shock at the interruption of one of life’s basic rhythms. I would never again have a summer vacation. But I gradually learned to stop living in 9 month units separated by interludes of relative freedom.

When we get older, we have to make a similar adjustment with respect to health. Life is no longer stretches of carefree prefect health separated by brief interludes of minor annoyances — injuries, dental issues, etc. Life becomes an ongoing effort of dealing with this and that.

Before she died in 2021 my Torah study friend Sue Lubin made an unexpectedly comforting remark about being old and having health issues. “At my age,” she said, “there’s always something going wrong. I just say ‘Add it on.'” How was that comforting?

But the older I get the stranger phenomenon comfort becomes.

Ten years ago, when I had a health scare, my friend Britt said horrible things. He didn’t listen like good listeners do. He didn’t say kind words. He certainly did not make sympathetic noises. The fucker did not say a single prayer for me or emit any positive vibes, or anything related to that well-wishing genre of benevolence. No. Britt made fun of me and of my fear and of the indignities I was enduring for the first time. He said it all paled in comparison to the ordeal of having a lemon-sized cyst in his asscrack lanced. His procedure was observed by a group of young, healthy, beautiful medical students. He said in the twilight of semi-lucidity before his anesthesia knocked him the rest of the way out, he feebly attempted to seduce his nurse with poetic overtures. He helped me understand that human dignity is not nearly as necessary as we assume when our dignity is still mostly-intact. It was comforting. It’s what comedians do, bless their hearts.

Buber versus design…?

Design, Judaism, Philosophy

Below are two passages from Buber that can read as rebukes to the designerly faith. The first evokes UX, the second, service design.

1.

Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.

Only now can the other basic word [I-It] be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I — an object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become hence-forth — but as it were an It for itself, something previously unnoticed that was waiting for the new relational event.

Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. Now, however, the detached I is transformed — reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one-dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects — and thus approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it, and joins with it to form the other basic word. The man who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity.

2.

He perceives the being that surrounds him, plain things and beings as things; he perceives what happens around him, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others — an ordered world, a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands-right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure — and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take it for your “truth”; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for you; but you cannot encounter others in it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you were to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness.

I will just let these two passages sit without comment for now.

Reflections on Fania Klausner

Chord

Before I quote two lengthy passages from Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, I would like to preface it with two aphorisms from the notorious sexist Nietzsche, in order to tilt the reader’s interpretive angle, and contaminate the reading of an already contaminated text.

The first (from Human, All Too Human):

A dialogue is the perfect conversation because everything that the one person says acquires its particular color, sound, its accompanying gesture in strict consideration of the other person to whom he is speaking; it is like letter-writing, where one and the same man shows ten ways of expressing his inner thoughts, depending on whether he is writing to this person or to that. In a dialogue, there is only one single refraction of thought: this is produced by the partner in conversation, the mirror in which we want to see our thoughts reflected as beautifully as possible. But how is it with two, or three, or more partners? There the conversation necessarily loses something of its individualizing refinement; the various considerations clash, cancel each other out; the phrase that pleases the one, does not accord with the character of the other. Therefore, a man interacting with several people is forced to fall back upon himself, to present the facts as they are, but rob the subject matter of that scintillating air of humanity that makes a conversation one of the most agreeable things in the world. Just listen to the tone in which men interacting with whole groups of men tend to speak; it is as if the ground bass of all speech were: “That is who I am; that is what I say; now you think what you will about it!” For this reason, clever women whom a man has met in society are generally remembered as strange, awkward, unappealing: it is speaking to and in front of many people that robs them of all intelligent amiability and turns a harsh light only on their conscious dependence on themselves, their tactics, and their intention to triumph publicly; while the same women in a dialogue become females again and rediscover their mind’s gracefulness.

The second (from Assorted Opinions and Maxims):

How and when a woman laughs is a mark of her culture: but in the sound of her laughter there is disclosed her nature, in the case of very cultured women perhaps even the last inextinguishable remnant of her nature. — That is why the psychologist will say with Horace, though for a different reason: ridete puellae [laugh, maidens].

Now for the two passages from Amos Oz, which are portraits of his mother, Fania Klausner, and her unusual style of participation in social gatherings:

Women hardly ever joined in the conversation. In those days it was customary to compliment women on being “such marvelous listeners,” on the cakes and biscuits, on the pleasant atmosphere, but not on their contribution to the conversation. . . .

Only my mother sometimes subverted this rule. When there was a moment’s silence, she would say something that at first might seem irrelevant but then could be seen to have gently shifted the center of gravity completely, without changing the subject or contradicting those who had spoken before, but rather as though she were opening a door in some back wall of the conversation that up to then had not seemed to have a doorway in it.

Once she had made her remark, she shut up, smiling agreeably and looking triumphantly not at the visitors or at my father but at me. After my mother had spoken, the whole conversation seemed to shift its weight from one foot to another. Soon afterward, still smiling her delicate smile that seemed to be doubting something while deciphering something else, she would get up and offer her guests another glass of tea: Please? How strong? And another slice of cake?

To the child I was then my mother’s brief intervention in the men’s conversation was rather distressing, perhaps because I sensed an invisible ripple of embarrassment among the speakers, an almost imperceptible search for a way out, as though there were a vague momentary fear that they might inadvertently have said or done something that had caused my mother to snigger at them, but none of them knew what it was. Maybe it was her withdrawn, radiant beauty that always embarrassed those inhibited men and made them fear she might not like them, or find them just a little repulsive.

As for the women, my mother’s interventions stirred in them a strange mixture of anxiety and hope that one day she would finally lose her footing, and perhaps a mite of pleasure at the men’s discomfiture.

Another:

The well-known scholars and writers were impressed by Father’s acuity and erudition. They knew they could always rely on his extensive knowledge whenever their dictionaries and reference works let them down. But even more than they made use of my father and took advantage of his expertise, they were openly pleased by my mother’s company. Her profound, inspirational attentiveness urged them on to tireless verbal feats. Something in her thoughtful presence, her unexpected questions, her look, her remarks, would shed a new, surprising light on the subject under discussion, and made them talk on and on as though they were slightly intoxicated, about their work, their creative struggles, their plans and their achievements. Sometimes my mother would produce an apposite quotation from the speaker’s own writings, remarking on a certain similarity to the ideas of Tolstoy, or she would identify a stoic quality in what was being said, or observe with a slight inclination of the head —at such moments her voice would take on a dark, winelike quality— that here her ear seemed to catch an almost Scandinavian note in the work of a writer who was present, an echo of Hamsun or Strindberg, or even of the mystical writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Thereupon my mother would resume her previous silence and alert attentiveness, like a finely tuned instrument, while they enchantedly lavished on her whatever they did or did not have on their minds as they competed for her attention.

Years later, when I happened to bump into one or two of them, they informed me that my mother had been a very charming woman and a truly inspired reader, the sort of reader every writer dreamed of when hard at work in the solitude of his study. What a pity she left no writings of her own: it was possible that her premature death had deprived us of a highly talented writer, at a time when women writing in Hebrew could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

If these notables met my father at the library or in the street, they would chat with him briefly about Education Minister Dinur’s letter to the heads of the university, or Zalman Shneour’s attempt to become Walt Whitman in his old age, or who would get Professor Klausner’s chair when he retired, and then they would pat him on the back and say, with a gleam in their eyes and a beaming expression, please greet your lady wife warmly from me, what a truly wonderful woman, such a cultivated, discerning woman! So artistic!

As they patted him affectionately on the shoulder, in their heart of hearts they may have envied him his wife and wondered what she had seen in him, that pedant, even if he was extraordinarily knowledgeable, industrious, and even, relatively speaking, a not insignificant scholar, but, between ourselves, a rather scholastic, totally uncreative person.

Chord: Participatory knowing

ANT, Chord, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Star

Three related passages, all hinting at the kind of participatory knowing that enworlds (as opposed to knowing that produces mere worldview). The first is from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, the second from Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness and the last from Bruno Latour’s Irreductions.

1.

Every child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form. From her, too, we are separated, and enter into personal life, slipping free only in the dark hours to be close to her again; night by night this happens to the healthy man. But this separation does not occur suddenly and catastrophically like the separation from the bodily mother; time is granted to the child to exchange a spiritual connexion, that is, relation, for the natural connexion with the world that he gradually loses. He has stepped out of the glowing darkness of chaos into the cool light of creation. But he does not possess it yet; he must first draw it truly out, he must make it into a reality for himself, he must find for himself his own world by seeing and hearing and touching and shaping it. Creation reveals, in meeting, its essential nature as form.

It does not spill itself into expectant senses, but rises up to meet the grasping senses. That which will eventually play as an accustomed object around the man who is fully developed, must be wooed and won by the developing man in strenuous action. For no thing is a ready-made part of an experience: only in the strength, acting and being acted upon, of what is over against men, is anything made accessible. Like primitive man the child lives between sleep and sleep (a great part of his waking hours is also sleep) in the flash and counter-flash of meeting.

2.

Two Finnish missionary ladies lived in a little apartment at the end of Ha-Turim Street in Mekor Baruch, Aili Havas and Rauha Moisio. Aunt Aili and Aunt Rauha. Even when the conversation turned to the shortage of vegetables, they both spoke high-flown, biblical Hebrew, because that was the only Hebrew they knew. If I knocked at their door to ask for some wood that we could use for the Lag Baomer bonfire, Aunt Aili would say with a gentle smile, as she handed me an old orange crate: “And the shining of a flaming fire by night!” If they came around to our apartment for a glass of tea and a bookish conversation while I was fighting against my cod-liver oil, Aunt Rauha might say: “The fishes of the sea shall shake at His presence!”

Sometimes the three of us paid them a visit in their Spartan one-room apartment, which resembled an austere nineteenth-century girls’ boarding school: two plain iron bedsteads stood facing each other on either side of a rectangular wooden table covered with a dark blue tablecloth, with three plain wooden chairs. Beside each of the matching beds was a small bedside table with a reading lamp, a glass of water, and some sacred books in black covers. Two identical pairs of bedroom slippers peered out from under the beds. In the middle of the table there was always a vase containing a bunch of everlasting flowers from the nearby fields. A carved olive-wood crucifix hung in the middle of the wall between the two beds. And at the foot of each bed stood a chest of drawers made from a thick shiny wood of a sort we did not have in Jerusalem, and Mother said it was called oak, and she encouraged me to touch it with my fingertips and run my hand over it.

My mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their “response” or “resistance.” Every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to the season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. It was no accident, she said, that Hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. It was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.

Father observed jokingly: “Our Mummy goes one further than King Solomon. Legend says that he understood the language of every animal and bird, but our Mummy has even mastered the languages of towels, saucepans, and brushes.” And he went on, beaming mischievously: “She can make trees and stones speak by touching them: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke, as it says in the Psalms.”

3.

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

*

We could call this an apeironic materialism, as opposed to a scientistic materialism.

I almost called the latter “physicist materialism” except that Latour and his associates have helped me understand that physics-in-the-making is quite apeironic in its practical attitude. Physics-ready-made, consumed by nonscientists, is the belief content of scientistic materialists, which, ironically, apes materialism: Materials are a matter of bodily engagement and revelation.

Athletes are our most thoroughgoing materialists, and the material they know most is their own bodies in their own material context of action.

(Re)welcoming Buber

Biography, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Philosophy

Last week I attended a class held by the Temple on Martin Buber. The class will cover Ten Rungs and The Way of Humanity, two of the many books Buber wrote in what I’ll call his “Hasidic mode”.

Buber’s interest in Hasidism will seem strange to people habituated to seeing Hasidim from the default Christian angle, as the ultimate “Pharisaical” Jews, who live in strict observance of a body of intricate, rigid and apparently arbitrary rules. There is significant truth to this image, but it is nowhere near the whole truth. It omits a fascinating dimension of Hasidic life that Buber emphasizes (and maybe over-emphasizes). What Buber finds inspiring in Hasidism is its rustic, vivid, lively but profound folk mysticism.

At the heart of this folk mysticism is a very simple and shifted vision of life, which is clearly Buber’s own (and since reading him fifteen or so years ago, also mine). Is it also the heart of Hasidism outside Buber’s idealized fantasy? I’ve seen evidence it might be, but I do not know.

But the Hasidic mode is only one expression of this vision. His other modes include two explicit prosaic modes, philosophical and theological.

The Buber who shocked me into a better life, and set me on my path to Judaism, was the one who wrote philosophically. My favorite book of his was always Between Man and Man.

But the mode I am contemplating today is the mode in which he wrote his most famous book, widely viewed as his magnum opus, I and Thou. My question concerns genre: what do we call this mode of writing?

I believe I and Thou is Buber’s hardest book. But it is also his most popular book. And it is also a poetic book. The language is beautiful and evocative. It is easy to enjoy aesthetically, allowing insights to come to us where they offer themselves, like ripe fruit falling from a tree. Jorge Luis Borges said of it:

But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber — I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, Dujovne, and I found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments. I think that somewhere in Walt Whitman the same idea can be found: the idea of reasons being unconvincing. I think he says somewhere that he finds the night air, the large few stars, far more convincing than mere arguments.

This suggests that Buber is — like Friedrich Nietzsche, one of his primary inspirations — a philosopher-poet. Like Buber, Nietzsche’s magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was written poetically, and is viewed as his most impenetrable work.

We could follow Jan Zwicky who is also a master of this mysterious genre, and call it “lyric philosophy”.

I have noticed something fascinating about these books, conspicuously common to Buber, Nietzsche and Zwicky, and it makes me want to suggest another, simpler, less novel label. When I read their books, I am existentially different. And the difference persists and permeates my life as long as I stay engaged. And the difference is not only a change in mood. It changes my whole perceptual field. I notice different givens, and my noticing is different. (For instance, Zwicky’s writing made birds intensely present around me.) All three attune me to a kind of energetic, space-filling humming that harmonizes the sounds of home, nature, traffic (air and road, living beings and machines. The different noticing is infused with valuing. And people seem different to me, and I want to interact with them differently. In other words, I change and the world re-enworlds around me in a better way, and the entire Who-Why-How-What manifold glows and vibrates with significance.

The medium-message in books like these is peculiarly independent of the content. Often I cannot even remember the specific factual content. These books act on me through my efforts to understanding the content — but the content is not the point. It does not matter What Buber or Nietzsche or Zwicky believe. What matters is Who they are, How they intuit and think, and Why it matters. If you read them urgently, actively, attentively — in the spirit Buber calls I-Thou — the Thou of the writing changes the I who reads and responds.

Isn’t this the effect… of prayer?

I would like to propose that these strange books are long, complex prayers, and that reading them in the way they ask to be read is engaging in a kind of petitionary prayer. In this prayer we invite infinitude back into our lives, once again, to abide with us in our finite I-Here-Now.

And then we forget, and our guest departs. So we pray again, if we remember to pray.

I think I love this kind of prayer book. I want to write prayer books. Maybe that is what my first “book” was (if you can call a pamphlet with nine sparse pages a book).

*

So, anyway, in the first class, Rabbi Sperling gave an overview of Buber’s life and works, and I realized I could remember almost none of the details of I and Thou. So I picked it up and started re-reading it (both the Smith and Kaufmann translations, together) and now I’m in a prayerworld all over again. I love it here.

*

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”, Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Stephen Mitchell.

Ward Farnsworth on Socratic method

Philosophy

Yesterday, I explored what irony is. I roughly characterized it as experiencing multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. It is the capacity of a mind to subdivide itself into interlocutors.

Today I’m looking at a book on Socratic method, and seeing better why Nietzsche called Socrates “the great ironist”.

On a Socratic view, denying what someone says is the act of a friend; you should want friends who deny what you say.

Such denials produce good things. If someone has a talent for denying your claims (hopefully with some indirection and tact), you might change your mind for the better. If not, you’re at least likely to end up with a better sense of why you think what you do. You will more clearly see the details and qualifications that go with it. You might become less sure what you think altogether. That will feel like a loss, but you will be closer to the truth, even if it’s a truth that, in some cases, you may never finally reach. In that event you still hold beliefs, but you hold them a little differently. You’re more humble, more aware of your ignorance, less likely to be sure when you shouldn’t be, and more understanding of others. Socrates regarded these as great gains in wisdom.

All this is what Socratic partners try to do for each other. They are good-natured and subtle contrarians. In practice this might nevertheless sound like a set of instructions for becoming unpopular or getting yourself killed. That’s what it was for Socrates. Take heart, though: describing the method as something practiced by one person on another is mostly a convenience to illustrate how it works. In real life and when reading Plato, too — Socratic questioning is better viewed mostly as a way to think about hard questions on your own.

You challenge yourself and harass yourself and test what you think and deny what you say, all as a Socrates would. That might sound easier than doing it to others. In fact it’s considerably harder. But it’s also more rewarding and less dangerous.

The ability and inclination to “challenge and harass oneself” in order to become less complacently cocksure of one’s own convictions, and consequently wiser, is to be an ironist. One of the more refined and effective ways to be an ironist is to adopt the Socratic method for your own autointerrogation practice.

By the way I like the author of this book, Ward Farnsworth. He teaches law at UT, and writes books on all sorts of topics. The book I quoted is The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook. He also wrote a companion volume, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual. I’ve read bits of both books, and they are simple and entertaining, but not dumbed-down in the least. He’s also written on argumentation, rhetoric and chess. I think I’m a fan.

Irony deficiency

Chord, Philosophy, Politics

Today I wandered through several books touching on irony.

It began with Geertz.

Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery. The common forms of it are familiar enough. In dramatic irony, deflation results from the contrast between what the character perceives the situation to be and what the audience knows it to be; in historical irony, from the inconsistency between the intentions of sovereign personages and the natural outcomes of actions proceeding from those intentions. Literary irony rests on a momentary conspiracy of author and reader against the stupidities and self-deceptions of the everyday world; Socratic, or pedagogical, irony rests on intellectual dissembling in order to parody intellectual pretension.

But the sort of irony which appears in anthropological fieldwork, though no less effective in puncturing illusion, is not quite like any of these. It is not dramatic, because it is double-edged: the actor sees through the audience as clearly as the audience through the actor. It is not historical, because it is acausal: it is not that one’s actions produce, through the internal logic of events, results the reverse of what was intended by them (though this sometimes happens too), but that one’s predictions of what other people will do, one’s social expectations, are constantly surprised by what, independently of one’s own behavior, they actually do. It is not literary, because not only are the parties not in league, but they are in different moral universes. And it is not Socratic, because it is not intellectual pretension which is parodied, but the mere communication of thought — and not by intellectual dissembling, but by an all-too-earnest, almost grim, effort at understanding.

Geertz and Rorty live side-by-side in my mind because I learned of both of them from the same wonderful, life-transforming book, Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Irony is central to Rorty’s work, so I dipped into what some consider his magnum opus, to refresh my memory of how he spoke of irony.

The attempt to fuse the public and the private lies behind both Plato’s attempt to answer the question “Why is it in one’s interest to be just?” and Christianity’s claim that perfect self-realization can be attained through service to others. Such metaphysical or theological attempts to unite a striving for perfection with a sense of community require us to acknowledge a common human nature. They ask us to believe that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others — that the springs of private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the same. Skeptics like Nietzsche have urged that metaphysics and theology are transparent attempts to make altruism look more reasonable than it is. Yet such skeptics typically have their own theories of human nature. They, too, claim that there is something common to all human beings – for example, the will to power, or libidinal impulses. Their point is that at the “deepest” level of the self there is no sense of human solidarity, that this sense is a “mere” artifact of human socialization. So such skeptics become antisocial. They turn their backs on the very idea of a community larger than a tiny circle of initiates.

Ever since Hegel, however, historicist thinkers have tried to get beyond this familiar standoff. They have denied that there is such a thing as “human nature” or the “deepest level of the self.” Their strategy has been to insist that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down — that there is nothing “beneath” socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human. . . . This historicist turn has helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics — from the temptation to look for an escape from time and chance. It has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress. But even after this substitution takes place, the old tension between the private and the public remains. Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates (e.g., Heidegger and Foucault) still tend to see socialization as Nietzsche did — as antithetical to something deep within us. Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates (e.g., Dewey and Habermas) are still inclined to see the desire for private perfection as infected with “irrationalism” and “aestheticism.” . . . I urge that we not try to choose between them but, rather, give them equal weight and then use them for different purposes. Authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov are useful as exemplars, as illustrations of what private perfection — a self-created, autonomous, human life — can be like. Authors such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls are fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort — the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel. We shall only think of these two kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision.

. . .

If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools — as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.

This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches a figure whom I call the “liberal ironist.” I borrow my definition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.

For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” — no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. . . . Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question — algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort — is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.

The ironist intellectuals who do not believe that there is such an order are far outnumbered (even in the lucky, rich, literate democracies) by people who believe that there must be one. Most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism. So ironism has often seemed intrinsically hostile not only to democracy but to human solidarity — to solidarity with the mass of mankind, all those people who are convinced that such an order must exist. But it is not. . . .

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?” This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. . . .

Then I began to dig into a book on the Socratic method by Ward Farnsworth. I did this not only because Geertz spoke of Socratic irony but because Nietzsche characterized Socrates as “the great ironist”, in multiple senses.

In Birth of Tragedy:

…that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man — how now? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks — merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans resolve against pessimism — a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science — indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what — worse yet, whence — all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against–truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your–irony? — —

In Beyond Good and Evil:

The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” — or, more clearly, of instinct and reason — that is to say, the question whether in regard to the evaluation of things instinct deserves to have more authority than rationality, which wants to evaluate and act according to reasons, according to a “Why?,” that is to say according to utility and fitness for a purpose — this is still that old moral problem which first appeared in the person of Socrates and was already dividing the minds of men long before Christianity.

There it is: “dividing minds”, not necessarily between persons but within a single soul. This dividing seems essential to irony. He continues:

Socrates himself, to be sure, had, with the taste appropriate to his talent — that of a superior dialectician — initially taken the side of reason; and what indeed did he do all his life long but laugh at the clumsy incapacity of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and were never able to supply adequate information about the reasons for their actions? Ultimately, however, in silence and secrecy, he laughed at himself too: he found in himself, before his more refined conscience and self-interrogation, the same difficulty and incapacity. But why, he exhorted himself, should one therefore abandon the instincts! One must help both them and reason to receive their due — one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments. This was the actual falsity of that great ironist, who had so many secrets; he induced his conscience to acquiesce in a sort of self-outwitting: fundamentally he had seen through the irrational aspect of moral judgment.

So now I want to understand better Nietzsche’s attitude toward irony.

I’m seeing some general patterns. He associates it with decadence and non-nobility. By these terms, I mean something specific that is not purely vicious, just as in Nietzsche’s thought nobility is not purely virtuous. Nobility is simply a matter of psychic unicity. A noble soul is undivided, uni-perspectival, inert and impervious. It does not question its instincts but trusts them and acts instinctively. It is rarely curious, open to change or reflective toward its own existence. A noble soul is unironic. Socrates was ironic because he lacked nobility.

But he also seems to see an interpersonal dimension to irony. Consider this:

The clearest sign that two people hold alienated views is that each says ironic things to the other, but neither of the two feels the other’s irony.

Of course, the division is not just between the alienated friends. Each friend is speaking ironically, and has the inward division irony requires. But the irony is not registering, which raises the question: what is each friend missing in what the other is saying? Is the second meaning in the ironic utterances what each friend mistakes for the other’s belief, so the irony does not land? Or has each friend lost all sense of the other’s complexity and hears psychic polytonality as monotony?

For a while I was associating irony with pluralism, and I don’t think I was wrong to do so. Irony might be a necessary (or at least extremely helpful) condition of pluralism. But I want to understand their similarities, differences and relationship more clearly. I think irony is multiplicity of view in a single moment of experience (like a chord), where pluralism is more experienced sequentially (like a scale).

In irony we experience multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. If we are pluralists, we can mute all but one of the truths in order to experience another as a purer and cohesive perspective.

I have become this way politically. I have become almost unable to straightforwardly speak about any single political position without simultaneously feeling the legitimate objections of two or more others — and more importantly the sheer magnitude of social complexity of the “hyperobject” each attempts to know and respond to.

But we can only do this if we have learned more than just the factual What content of other political positions. Even more we must know how to dance the How of its logic and feel the Why of its driving concerns.

More and more I find this kind of irony is what is most lacking in contemporary political and social discourse.

Geertz’s three lessons

Philosophy

I’m reading Geertz this morning. He and Rorty remind me of one another, not only in their style of thinking, but in their humor. Recalling his first fieldwork, and the 800 page dissertation he wrote on it, and the 500 page book he distilled from his dissertation, Geertz summarized what he gained from the years of effort in three offhand lessons:

1. Anthropology, at least of the sort I profess and practice, involves a seriously divided life. The skills needed in the classroom or at the desk and those needed in the field are quite different. Success in the one setting does not insure success in the other. And vice versa.

2. The study of other peoples’ cultures (and of one’s own as well, but that brings up other issues) involves discovering who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, something a good deal less straightforward than the ordinary canons of Notes and Queries ethnography, or for that matter the glossy impressionism of pop art “cultural studies,” would suggest.

3. To discover who people think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, it is necessary to gain a working familiarity with the frames of meaning within which they enact their lives. This does not involve feeling anyone else’s feelings, or thinking anyone else’s thoughts, simple impossibilities. Nor does it involve going native, an impractical idea, inevitably bogus. It involves learning how, as a being from elsewhere with a world of one’s own, to live with them.

Reading Geertz, I’m realizing how much I’ve imitated his tone, and that of Rorty and Howie Becker, specifically when I speak about design. It is the tone of those whose abstraction span stretches from deep space to the dirt under one’s feet because the ideas they discuss are ideas they have used for many years.

I am in a phase right now where I need absolutely everything I handle to have a traceable concrete lineage. I cannot tolerate the level of alienated abstraction I’ve been enduring.

Closest and most demonstrable

Biography, Philosophy

One of my favorite deep cut Nietzsche passages:

The two principles of the new life. —

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

Someday I should make a “Jefferson’s Bible” of Nietzsche quotes that freed me from the dismal faith of my youth and initiated me into a far better one.

The Nietzsche I revere and love is not the macho Nietzsche who emerges when you start with his most popular and most tattooed quotations. “God is dead.” “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” “When you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” And, of course, there is the new antisemite favorite “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Midwits love a paradox.

My favorite Nietzsche is the early-middle Nietzsche who wrote Human All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science. I love precisely the books that were excluded from the two Walter Kaufmann collections, Portable Nietzsche and Basic Writings, which is a little puzzling because I prefer Kaufmann’s translations to all others.

These were the books Nietzsche wrote mid-metamorphosis as he transformed himself from brilliant academic philologist to mystical firebrand. In them, he reflected on his war with his own received faith. The battlefront was questioning the sacred morality of his own culture — a morality so sacred that even asking is an unforgivable blasphemy.

Central to this drama is an intellectual conscience, sensitive, exacting, demanding, thorough and sometimes brutal. This is what Nietzsche awakened in me. He taught me to ask “Do I really believe this?” and to not confuse this question with “Can I argue this?” Because just as we must never confuse truth with reality, we must never confuse belief with faith.

Reconceiving KPIs

Design

(This is me working out some thoughts for work.)

My company hosts an event each year that we call Practice Week. It is a week set aside for reflection and learning, focused on the strange discipline known as service design. This year our team is dividing into “pods”, each focusing on some area of interest or importance to service design.

My pod’s subject is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Service Design.

According to Wikipedia, “KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”

It is indisputable that KPIs are terribly important in business, and this is why we are learning about them, not because any of us are compelled by this subject. We confessed to one another that, for a variety reasons, we were suffering a lack of intrinsic interest. For us KPIs have been a necessary evil — a combination of 1) boring, 2) abstract and 3) morally suspect.

After sharing our reservations about KPIs, it occurred to us that maybe challenging these reservations directly might breathe some inspiration into our session.

We asked:

  1. Are KPIs essentially boring, abstract and suspect — or do they just seem this way to us because of how we’ve approached them?
  2. Might there be a way to approach them that makes them interesting, tangibly real and a valuable part of our service design practice?

In other words, is there a philosophical opportunity to reconceive KPIs in a way that helps service designers organically integrate KPIs into our praxis?

(Honestly, this reunderstanding of uninteresting and trivial matters as fascinating and worthy problems is a core skill for designers — or at least designers like me. If we choose to rely on work ethic and willpower to slog through work we find boring , we will inevitably produce uninspired, uninspiring designs that are good for little more than setting the stage for implementation. We will become what engineers think we are: a preliminary planning step on the way toward the real work of building. If we endure the boredom, we can certainly bullshit ourselves and others and playact enthusiasm, but our “positivity” performances will be even more boring and unconvincing than our work. We’ll contribute to transforming the world into meaningless, joyless bullshit. As someone with a feeble work ethic and poor acting skills, I’ve never had any choice but to resort to philosophy in order to find genuine interest in problems that initially strike me as irredeemably dull and pointless. I suppose I shouldn’t say things like this out loud, but imprudent candidness is a key spice in my flavorful practice.) …

…So moving toward framing this problem as a design brief, some questions emerge, pertaining to the three repellent characteristics of KPIs.

  1. Can we change our understanding of KPIs interesting in a way that reveals KPIs as an interesting aspect of design work — an aspect we are intrinsically motivated to use?
  2. Can we ground our understanding of KPIs in realities we intuit directly and concretely, and make an abstract “experience-distant” knowing more “experience-near“?
  3. If we are able to intuitively understand KPIs and able to incorporate them into our practices, what possibilities of influence does this open to us? Might KPIs empower us to find more profound and demonstrable win-wins benefitting both an organization’s bottom line and the wider world?

But should they (and measurements in general) be as all-important as they currently are? And how reliable are they? Do KPIs produce unintended consequences, both in outcome and in the experience of work?

Ethos, ethic, game and rule

Ethics

Borrowing from Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, I want to experiment with a rhetorical approach of speaking of ethics in terms of games and rules.

Every ethic belongs to an ethos and serves that ethos.

Apart from the ethos it serves, though, an ethic is meaningless.

Following an ethical rule outside the context of its ethos is absurd, just as following the rules of a game outside of game-play is absurd.

Imagine, for instance, a tennis player so fanatically dedicated to the game of tennis that, even off-court, they continue following the rules of tennis, and expect others to follow the rules of tennis at all times, too.

Or imagine the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, and suddenly, without warning, the Steelers begin brawling. They are joined by their fans, who swarm out of the stands onto the field and overwhelm the Cowboys with numbers. Would the valiant Cowboys continue playing by the rules of football, avoiding holding and unnecessary roughness penalties, while the Pittsburgh hooligans subject them to atomic super-wedgies and hang them from the goalposts by their blown-out waistbands?

Now imagine, following their 821-0 victory over the Cowboys, the Steelers hooligans move up the street to the basketball arena and storm the court where the Dallas Mavericks are playing. The Steelers and their hooligans crowd onto the court and score touchdown after touchdown against the confused and defenseless Mavericks. The Mavericks take the high road and stick to the rules of basketball, but they score neither baskets nor touchdowns. They score only moral points, and these do not count toward victory. Eventually, using their new formula for victory, the Steelers become the champions not only of the NFL, but also the NBA, the WNBA, the MLB, NHL and every Olympic event.

When the game changes, the rules change with it.

The problem is, a great many of us mistake our own ethos for reality itself. And we mistake the rules of our own ethos, our ethic, for absolute universally-binding laws of human conduct, which all decent people must follow. We continue following the rules of the game off-court, and expect others to do as well, even if they’ve never agreed to participate in our ethos — or even reject our ethos.

In the future, when someone invokes an ethical principle, my first question will be: To what game does this rule belong? Am I obligated to play this game? Did I explicitly or implicitly consent to it?

If I am obligated, I will ask for clarification on the rules that bind both parties, and on who referees these rules?

If I am not obligated, I will recognize that I am in a far more interesting game: the game of determining the game, the rules of the game, and the referee of the rules.

Technicracy (sic)

Philosophy

It never occurred to me before today to understand a technocracy as rule by (or under) technic (or technik or technicity, depending on translation) as conceived by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology.

I prefer the term technicity. Technicity is the enworldment within which all things are understood, first and foremost, as means to ends. “What is it for?” is the compulsive next question, following “What is it?” It is the root of the industrial faith, and the true source of our misery under capitalism, and even more under various anti-capitalisms.

Trapped within the hollow, arid, robotically hostile strain we call corporate life, the technicity-bound rebel can dream nothing better than socialism. But socialism is a dream of technicity itself, guaranteeing the same miseries of capitalism, but in even purer form, without the vestigial consolations of pre-industrial life that have been smuggled into capitalism through liberal protections of the private sphere.

To sloganize:

  • The enemy is neither capitalism nor socialism, but their common faith, technicity.
  • Fundamentalism is what happens when the objects of religion are uprooted from their proper soil and planted in the sand of technicity.
  • Those trapped in technicity can only perceive, conceive, intuit and imagine inside the narrow limits of technicity. When the technicity-possessed say religion, they can mean only fundamentalism. When they dream escape from their misery, they dream leaps out of technicic pans into technicic fires.
  • It is trivially easy to swap out belief content within the same technic faith. Fundamentalist Christians can dump out their religious beliefs and replace them with Progressivist ones without much deep adjustment or change in life experience. But religious conversion is not essentially about beliefs. It is about the substratum that makes beliefs intelligible and persuasive (or sheer nonsense), the substratum of faith. You cannot stay in technicity and understand religious existence.
  • “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.” — Wittgenstein

The book we need

Philosophy

Fuck yes. Technic and Magic is exactly the book this time needs:

This book is not a political manifesto, or a general call to arms. More modestly, it is a reminder that reality-­systems are contingent conglomerates of metaphysical axioms, and that their modiication is always possible. Indeed, we are always able to modify our own reality­-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck. This volume is intended for those who lie defeated by history and the present, in the most general and most tragic sense. Regardless of the historical circumstances in which we ind ourselves to live, and even if we are completely hopeless about our power to modify the balance of forces on a macroscopic scale, we are always capable of modifying our own reality-­settings  – thus giving to ourselves a different reality, a different world and a different existential experience within it. Is it pure illusion? Not any more, or any less, than any other reality or any other world that is hegemonic enough to impose its own social institutions over a speciic historical period.

It was the book I wanted to write.

I’m disappointed and thrilled.