All posts by anomalogue

Maturing

Chord, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

Reading Appendix A of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, “Campaigns and Movements” I came upon this bit: “Most of us, when young, hope for purity of heart. The easiest way to assure oneself of this purity is to will one thing—but this requires seeing everything as part of a pattern whose center is that single thing. Movements offer such a pattern, and thus offer such assurance of purity. [Irving] Howe’s ability, in his later decades, to retain both critical consciousness and political conscience while not attempting to fuse the two into something larger than either, showed his admirers how to forgo such purity, and such a pattern.”

That brought to mind another passage from the introduction of Nicolai Berdyaev’s Slavery and Freedom: “My thought has always belonged to the existential type of philosophy. The inconsistencies and contradictions which are to be found in my thought are expressions of spiritual conflict, of contradictions which lie at the very heart of existence itself, and are not to be disguised by a facade of logical unity.”

For me, this immediately connects up with three themes from Nietzsche’s thought: youth, wholesale thinking, and the compulsion to systematize. (To poke around in my glorious wiki — and you really should — use the password “generalad”). Rather than explicitly draw every connection, I will juxtapose some passages and make a concept chord meant to convey an ideal of maturity I learned from Nietzsche.

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Rough consistency. — It is considered a mark of great distinction when people say ‘he is a character!’ — which means no more than that he exhibits a rough consistency, a consistency apparent even to the dullest eye! But when a subtler and profounder spirit reigns and is consistent in its more elevated manner, the spectators deny the existence of character. That is why statesmen with cunning usually act out their comedy beneath a cloak of rough consistency.

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Beware of systematisers! — Systematisers practise a kind of play-acting: in as much as they want to fill out a system and round off its horizon, they have to try to present their weaker qualities in the same style as their stronger — they try to impersonate whole and uniformly strong natures.

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I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

*

Youth and criticism. — To criticize a book means to a young person no more than to repulse every single productive idea it contains and to defend oneself against it tooth and claw. A youth lives in a condition of perpetual self-defence against everything new that he cannot love wholesale, and in this condition perpetrates a superfluous crime against it as often as ever he can.

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Consciousness. — Consciousness is the latest development of the organic, and hence also its most unfinished and unrobust feature. Consciousness gives rise to countless mistakes that lead an animal or human being to perish sooner than necessary, ‘beyond destiny’, as Homer puts it.’ If the preserving alliance of the instincts were not so much more powerful, if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish with open eyes of its misjudging and its fantasizing, of its lack of thoroughness and its incredulity in short, of its consciousness; or rather, without the instincts, humanity would long have ceased to exist! Before a function is fully developed and mature, it constitutes a danger to the organism, it is a good thing for it to be properly tyrannized in the meantime! Thus, consciousness is properly tyrannized — and not least by one’s pride in it! One thinks it constitutes the kernel of man, what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, most original in him! One takes consciousness to be a given determinate magnitude! One denies its growth and intermittences! Sees it as ‘the unity of the organism’! This ridiculous overestimation and misapprehension of consciousness has the very useful consequence that an all-too-rapid development of consciousness was prevented. Since they thought they already possessed it, human beings did not take much trouble to acquire it, and things are no different today! The task of assimilating knowledge and making it instinctive is still quite new; it is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is yet barely discernible it is a task seen only by those who have understood that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all of our consciousness refers to errors!

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When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuance which constitutes life’s greatest prize, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial: as the real artists of life do. The wrathful and reverent attitudes characteristic of youth do not seem to permit themselves any rest until they have forged men and things in such a way that these attitudes may be vented on them: — after all, youth in itself has something of forgery and deception. Later, when the young soul, tortured by all kinds of disappointments, finally turns suspiciously against itself, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it tears itself to pieces, impatiently, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, just as if it had been a deliberate blindness! In this transition one punishes oneself with mistrust against one’s own feelings; one tortures one’s own enthusiasm with doubts, indeed, one experiences even a good conscience as a danger, as if it were a way of wrapping oneself in veils and the exhaustion of subtler honesty; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against ‘youth.’– A decade later: one comprehends that all this, too–was youth!

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The so-called soul. — The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy, and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; — if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless.

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The serious workman. — Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. The acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example, is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says “I do not have enough talent.” One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. — What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Perhaps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons. — Sometimes, when the character and intellect needed to formulate such a life-plan are lacking, fate and need take their place and lead the future master step by step through all the stipulations of his trade.

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Learning. — Michelangelo saw in Raphael study, in himself nature: there learning, here talent. This, with all deference to the great pedant, is pedantic. For what is talent but a name for an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, incorporation, whether at the stage of our fathers or an even earlier stage! And again: he who learns bestows talent upon himself — only it is not so easy to learn, and not only a matter of having the will to do so; one has to be able to learn. In the case of an artist learning is often prevented by envy, or by that pride which puts forth its sting as soon as it senses the presence of something strange and involuntarily assumes a defensive instead of a receptive posture. Raphael, like Goethe, was without pride or envy, and that is why both were great learners and not merely exploiters of those veins of ore washed clean from the siftings of the history of their forefathers. Raphael vanishes as a learner in the midst of appropriating that which his great competitor designated as his ‘nature’: he took away a piece of it every day, this noblest of thieves; but before he had taken over the whole of Michelangelo into himself, he died — and his last series of works is, as the beginning of a new plan of study, less perfect and absolutely good precisely because the great learner was interrupted in his hardest curriculum and took away with him the justificatory ultimate goal towards which he looked.

*

A man’s maturity — consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

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Human beings are naturally artificial.

It is not our nature that is most precious; it is our hard-won second-nature, that set of artifices that are so well-designed that they disappear into our being and into the world we perceive around us. They become so natural to us that we can no longer experience them as man-made, and we begin to see them as God-given if we see them at all. And they are God-given, if we understand our real relationship with God.

Amen?

Betrayal of liberalism in the name of liberalism

Ethics, Politics

This passage from Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1997) helps me pinpoint the shift from a predominant liberalism to illiberalism in the popular left:

The academic, cultural Left approves — in a rather distant and lofty way — of the activities of these surviving reformists. But it retains a conviction which solidified in the late Sixties. It thinks that the system, and not just the laws, must be changed. Reformism is not good enough. Because the very vocabulary of liberal politics is infected with dubious presuppositions which need to be exposed, the first task of the Left must be, just as Confucius said, the rectification of names. The concern to do what the Sixties called “naming the system” takes precedence over reforming the laws.

“The system” is sometimes identified as “late capitalism,” but the cultural Left does not think much about what the alternatives to a market economy might be, or about how to combine political freedom with centralized economic decisionmaking. Nor does it spend much time asking whether Americans are undertaxed, or how much of a welfare state the country can afford, or whether the United States should back out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural Left has little to say in reply. For it prefers not to talk about money. Its principal enemy is a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements — a way of thinking which is, supposedly, at the root of both selfishness and sadism. This way of thinking is sometimes called “Cold War ideology,” sometimes “technocratic rationality,” and sometimes “phallogocentrism” (the cultural Left comes up with fresh sobriquets every year). It is a mind-set nurtured by the patriarchal and capitalist institutions of the industrial West, and its bad effects are most clearly visible in the United States.

To subvert this way of thinking. the academic Left believes, we must teach Americans to recognize otherness. To this end, leftists have helped to put together such academic disciplines as women’s history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies. This has led Stefan Collini to remark that in the United States, though not in Britain. the term “cultural studies” means victim studies.” Cellini’s choice of phrase has been resented, but he was making a good point: namely, that such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather from a sense of what America needed in order to make itself a better place. The principal motive behind the new directions taken in scholarship in the United States since the Sixties has been the urge to do something for people who have been humiliated — to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable.

Whereas the top-down initiatives of the Old Left had tried to help people who were humiliated by poverty and unemployment, or by what Richard Sennett has called the “hidden injuries of class, ” the top-down initiatives of the post-Sixties left have been directed toward people who are humiliated for reasons other than economic status. Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer­park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not “other” in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.

This cultural Left has had extraordinary success. In addition to being centers of genuinely original scholarship, the new academic programs have done what they were, semi­ consciously, designed to do: they have decreased the amount of sadism in our society. Especially among college graduates, the casual infliction of humiliation is much less socially acceptable than it was during the first two-thirds of the century. The tone in which educated men talk about women, and educated whites about blacks, is very different from what it was before the Sixties. Life for homosexual Americans, beleaguered and dangerous as it still is, is better than it was before Stonewall. The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as “politically correct” has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago. Except for a few Supreme Court decisions, there has been little change for the better in our country’s laws since the Sixties. But the change in the way we treat one another has been enormous.

The key phrase is “the casual infliction of humiliation is much less socially acceptable than it was during the first two-thirds of the century.” This resonates with my own understanding, and I believe that actually was the left’s mission until fairly recently. We were supposed to oppose the humiliation of other people, and most of all, from humiliating others on the basic of categories we have ourselves have assigned them.

But what I am seeing now is a very strong desire for the humiliated to finally get their turn to humiliate.

Most folks on the popular left see this counter-humiliation in terms of a financial metaphor — as a sort of “social capital” account, debited when praised, honored or granted of privileges, and withdrawn against when criticized, scorned or penalized.

I’m a little skeptical that many have even questioned this metaphor, which functions as a Kuhnian paradigm among subscribers of the left worldview, and which unconsciously guide all their thinking, judgments and even their perceptions. I have also seen little evidence many of them have questioned the either the scientific or moral validity of the sweeping generalizations they make and their applications of these generalizations to individuals to whom they assign to categories. This practice was once condemned by all liberals as as prejudice, but prejudice has been redefined to allow encourage people of certain disprivileged categories to vent their resentments on individuals of other categories.

I don’t believe privilege functions like one fund that can be transferred to another through inflicting humiliation. Yes, there does seem to be short-term influx of visceral pleasure on one side at the apparent “expense” of the other, but the pleasure gains soon evaporate, while the anger of the humiliated lingers and festers, and ultimately the sum of the transaction is a red negative. In fact, there was no transaction, only an abusive interaction performed for the sake of getting to be the abuser — in other words, sadistic pleasure.

I also don’t believe individuals automatically get to draw from cultural capital held in common by social categories. There is no such thing as a quantity of “white male heterosexual” prestige anyone of that category can access and use or spend wherever they wish. Social capital just doesn’t work that way. Treating categories constructed on resemblances one has observed as realities capable of intention, moral agency, practical effectiveness is reification, a confusion of what a subject views as true and the reality beyond what a subject imagines. (And of course, the social or legal imposition of one’s own reifications upon real individuals who do not share one’s beliefs about the reality or the properties or the theoretical justifications of these categories, however much one is convinced of their validy, is one of the traditional core prohibitions of liberalism.)

And, finally, I don’t think people who lash out at various categories of person are actually motivated by a desire to improve the world, however much they pose as champions of the oppressed and however much they justify their attitudes and actions with social scientistic arguments, one-mindedness with everyone who matters, and memories of tearful moments of insight cuddled up with their favorite novels on Sunday afternoons.

All these highminded concepts, proud unanimity and empathetic sentiments are prettifying rationalizations for enjoying what liberalism has always forbidden on principle: hatred of the Other.

And they are most definitely not, as they claim, “punching up”. It is only their refusal to factor class into their assessments of relative privilege that permit this delusion of “speaking truth to power”. As Thomas Frank persuasively pointed out, they’re actually “speaking truth to weakness” from a position of superior class (remember class, fellow liberals?) and generating enormous resentment in a group that is becoming dangerously sick of being scolded. Pay attention to the actual educational pedigree, income bracket, actual, individual institutional position and relative vulnerabilities of who is doing the judgmental confrontation and who is being judged, and you’ll certainly find a power differential, but not the one doing the judging sees or wants you to see.

Everyone outside the ideological sphere of the pop-left and radical academic left sees it though, plain as day. And this number includes not only the awful elements of the right. It also includes leftists who still believe in liberalism, Moderate libertarians and most centrists. To us, this looks very bad, not only practically, but ethically. It is not only a matter of electoral consequences, it is a matter of where we stand on the most important matters, whether we can actually count people who carry on this way as allies at all.

If liberals do not renounce casual infliction of humiliation on despised categories of people, bad things are definitely going to happen, and those things will happen as a direct result of indulging prejudice, hate and sadism. There is no honor in such calamities, only disgrace and discredit.

Once again, I will quote one of America’s greatest liberals, Martin Luther King.

In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself.

Liberals need to get back to the morality that alone justifies us, and we need to return to practicing what we preach. We mist stand up to prejudice, hatred and humiliation of all our fellow Americans, whoever the perpetrator and whoever the target, and whatever the rationalization.

Antiwholesale

Philosophy

Some thinkers are exciting to disagree with, not only despite how exasperating they are, but maybe because of it. I have whiplash from alternating nodding and head-shaking, reading Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. Marginalia from the last three pages: “yes” “yes” “No!” “??!” “Fuck no!” “Illiberal” “Yeeesh.” “Creepy!” “YES!!!”

The older I get, and the firmer, more specific and more nuanced I become in my moral attitudes the less I find myself able to agree completely with any other individual. I take my agreements where I can get them, and I refuse to ignore differences — big, small, shallow or profound — for the sake of preserving a sense of total agreement or total disagreement.

The principled abstinence from wholesale acceptance or rejection of anything has become one of my firmest moral attitudes. I suppose I see this as a virtue and I am proud of it. I need a name for this virtue.

Any explicit concept or implicit attitude that looks to me like a device for wholesaling (positive or negative) will trigger a suspicion of intellectual immaturity, degradation or dementia, and I actually feel sympathetic shame for people who seem to need such things.

Tradition of self-criticism

Philosophy

A tradition of self-criticism might be comprehensible only to self-critical individuals who have developed their own capacity for justice through long, painful process of increasingly severe self-criticism and overcoming of personal flaws, mistakes and profound errors of judgment.

For those who cannot bear negative judgment, criticism and justice is imposed by an outside judge.

Master of the Golden Rule

Ethics, Philosophy

Imagine a man sitting down and pondering the Golden Rule. He thinks through what he knows to be true, what he loves and desires, and what practices have served him well in his life. Then he imagines a world where everyone is required to think, feel and do what he knows to be best. He asks himself if he would like someone to impose these norms upon him. Yes he would. So he does unto others as he would like done unto himself.

Intellectual infanticide, Ares’s handpuppets, and agonistic homeopathy

Philosophy

Agonistic pluralism is perhaps the most important political concept I’ve learned in the last ten years. It holds that all liberal-democratic political positions are uneasy bundles of internally contradicting principles (or, more accurately, heuristics) which will, inevitably, be interpreted differently by different people at different times, and which therefore must be resolved through a flexible process of reasoned deliberation and inquiry.

My own belief is that an individual is defined as much as anything by peculiar configurations of judgment which are irreducibly hermeneutic (interpretive) and not direct applications of algorithmic rules to empirical data. Where we seek to eliminate judgment, we seek to eliminate individuality and abandon the domain of liberalism.

Where a person believes his or her own beliefs to be purely logical and empirical (omitting the role of interpretation not only in conception, but to the unconscious selective and prioritizing actions of perception) and to be the correct understanding of the truth (omitting the crucially important dimension of pluralism, which abolishes the rule of the excluded middle from all domains but that of formal logic).

We must expect conflict. We must expect to discover some degree of validity in opposing viewpoints, even when our own correctness is self-evident. We must interpret our own no-brainer truths as brain-deficient notions. We must be profoundly suspicious of our own convictions, most of all when they are open-shut. We must be severe and follow our angst when our hearts want to follow our bliss. We must follow this road less traveled.

We must try, even though we will always fail, to be publicly symmetrical. We must cleave radically to the Silver Rule: do not do to others what is hateful to you.

We hate that asshole who is so serenely oblivious to his own peculiarly personal judgment that he cannot see how subjective his own objectivity is. And what is objective is universally binding. It is self-evident to left-illiberals that they are the most benevolent and just and that anyone to their right is either deluded or in on some conspiracy to delude the gullible. And vice versa.

Illiberalism, like fundamentalism, flourishes in its oppositional illiberalisms. Back in crazier days I called this phenomenon “Ares’s handpuppets”. Ares loves only war. He is known to play sides against each other to produce, intensify and prolong war. If you pick a side, thinking the enemy of your enemy must be your friend, you are now possessed by Ares. I am speaking figuratively here in a way far more literal than you might imagine.

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One more thing: many people have begun to note a “rightward” drift in my thinking, but this drift is rightward only relative to what I have come to regard as an illiberal attitude against money in the left orthodoxy. I believe that well-cultivated economies can produce ranges of equality supportive of liberal-democracy, but I still far from believing economic wildernesses automatically produce these effects, and those who claim such are often on the predator end of the predator-prey continuum. I believe this still places me to the left of liberalism.

But the reason I have become pro-money is that there are a few liberal institutions that manage to collapse the unmanageable richness of individual judgments into manageable and quantifiable general units, and those two units are dollars and votes. Without the aid of these two units we would have no means of public self-regulation.

This is a barely-formed insight and nowhere near a carefully thought-out position, but this is how thoughts are born: as defenseless babies. To instantly attack a new insight of this kind simply because it is not yet defensible is intellectual infanticide. I feel it is time to throw it out there to toddle around in the playground of my blog. I hope you’ll play with it, and try to entertain what it could be in mature form rather than immediately murder it for the unforgivable crime of not yet being a full-grown, combat-trained ideology. Even if it doesn’t get along perfectly with your own intellectual brat. Because there’s nothing worse than parents who lose all perspective when their kid gets in a conflict with another kid. They’re all kids — yours, theirs — and we must stay adults even — especially — when we feel our own kid’s anguish with that immediacy only parents know.

Oppositional reading

Philosophy

I got very little from Nietzsche until I learned to read him oppositionally.

I had to want urgently to know exactly what he was explaining and what he was implying, not only at the aphorism-level, but the book- and corpus-level, and be equally ready to fight for or against it, depending on my own soul’s response. I took sides against nobility, while experiencing its value and profound importance — to me, personally, in the very act of opposing it.

Every person should be heard

Ethics, Politics

Just because a person shouldn’t be believed, it doesn’t mean that person shouldn’t be listened to.

It is dehumanizing for a person to be judged as not worth listening to, and it is inhumanizing to make oneself the judge of whose voice is heard and whose is silenced.

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People are astonished when I say nobody should always automatically be believed about anything, but that all people should always automatically be heard.

What? The right to a trial is a fundamental principle of liberalism!

And people want to give even more emphasis to STEM disciplines. As if the main problems of humankind are technical problems. As if even more technology will save us from our social problems.

When the goal of educating citizens is lost, and education becomes training employees for industry, or worse, credentialing employees for employment, this is what happens.

The ordinance of time

Philosophy

We stand on the shoulders of titans, and it is only from that height that we can survey the damage we did.

Our current privileged perspective on justice is merely the top layer of layers upon layers of former justice which can now be seen as unjust. Knock it all down and we will become base again. Build upon where we are and we will still be judged by future generations, who will look down upon us and see how we came up short.

Anaximander’s maxim: “Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.”

Edit: Two Stories About Skin

Fables, myths & parables, Symbols and diagrams

He was evicted by an overwhelming need: He had to leave this place immediately. It was not a matter of escaping here; it was a matter of being there, a there unknown apart from its distance, a distance from which he could see his home whole against the sky, the distance prescribed to those who aspire to love.

He stripped some bark from a nearby tree. On the bark’s smooth inner wall he created a map. Then he set off to survey the edges of the world. As he traveled, he traced out his path on the map. As his map neared perfection, the dense concentric loops finally showed him an exit.

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In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood;
and the snakes will grow like trees,
depositing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
they will lie about on the ground
like broken branches.

(Original here.)

Even more right

Philosophy

If you think being right is a matter of avoiding being wrong, you’ll neglect a more important and more interesting challenge: trying to be even more right than you already are.

The deepest religious conversions do not have the structure of mere reversal, negation or inversion — they change the terms such that one’s old understandings are seen as simply missing the mark, being beside the point. It is less, “I was wrong, but now I’m right,” and more “I wasn’t right enough, and now I’ve become more right.”

Understandings, by the way, should not be confused with the doctrines we affirm as true. The strongest and least noticed effect of an understanding is what we see when we look and what questions arise from what we see, and these are limited by what questions we know how to ask.

If we use the optical metaphor of a perspective, the lines of inquiry are the perspectival grid that draw our eyes to a vanishing point on a horizon, suggested in the general thrust of our questions, defined by our standpoint but appearing to belong to the scene itself. Only movement around the scene reveals the relationship between seer, seen and scene.

I’m no fan of Plato, but:

Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.

Peripatetic philosophy entails actively getting up and seeing from many angles.

Surprise vs comprise

Philosophy

I’ve called my metaphysic a “metaphysic of surprise”. To get what I mean by this, it is helpful to keep in mind the basic terms of my metaphysical conceptualization, which are 1) metaphysical reality versus 2) our understanding of reality which is truth.

In my view truth is an adequate-as-possible person-reality interface, true to the degree that it affords effective interaction, and never an exhaustive symbolic representation of reality as naive thinkers (at least in our culture) seem to reflexively assume. Truth is more like a well-designed, well-made tool than it is a tiny symbolic duplicate of reality we carry around inside our heads. Not to exclude tiny symbolic models, since maps are among our most useful tools, just that a map is only one of many useful tools, and maybe not even the most typical one.

This way of thinking about truth is what Dewey called “instrumentalism”. As a designer, my ears prick right up at this notion: tools ought to be designed, but all too often they are only engineered, with the result that only fellow engineers can master them. Is this not the case with philosophies? Philosophy needs a Steve Jobs to barge in and demand that we design our philosophies intentionally to be useful, usable and desirable for the people who use them, and understand the world through them, and (if the tool is well-designed and well-made) will become such a fine extension of our own being, we will forget we are using them at all and simply experience reality as our philosophy presents them, as self evidently what it is.

But no matter how solid our craftsmanship we can never avoid the reality or reality. Reality will always glow beneath the surface of what we make of it, through the seams, the worn spots, the flaws, the cracks that form from careless use. And reality can also erupt through truth and shock us with both its reality and with how our truth cannot deal with it. We get truly locked up because we don’t think about using truth, we think with our truth, and when reality breaks our truth, thinking simply can’t work. We can’t even talk about what is happening unless we have tools for accounting for such breaks. We can even experience total breaks where our entire truth is experienced as broken, which paradoxically allows us to know the truth about truth. We never know truth better than we have none. This is when religion happens. This is when mystery is here.

This is when the conceptual schema that give us the sense the world is comprised (com+prise, together-grasp) can be seen in its provinciality, as something (literally) incomprehensibly vast, defying not only quantity but quality — in other words, infinity — is known in the most non-comprehending way. Should the word be suprehended? At any rate, we can be utterly certain that we are surrounded by a reality that defies our current understanding and expectations. Etymologically, surprise means beyond–grasp which has a fine double-meaning of being beyond one’s grasp or of being in the grasp of the beyond. Being surprised can be viewed as comprehending turned inside-out.

What am I?

Philosophy

Metaphysically, I am a mystic.

Ethically, I am, at bottom, and maybe only at bottom, Reform Jewish.

Somehow, not exactly epistemologically, I am a Deweyan pragmatist, an Instrumentalist. I suspect I believe epistemology is one huge category mistake. Maybe my ontology of truth is pragmatist. My politics certainly are pragmatist. If you are asking “and therefore…?”, the pragmatic consequence of my pragmatism — its cash value — is that I analyze the meaning of beliefs using pragmatist method.

Oh! Epistemologically, I am scientific. But this is less a matter of “how do we know” and more an ethic of what must be done in order to expect to have one’s beliefs considered true by others.

Ontologically, I suppose I am a phenomenologist, as long as the fact that I am a mystic realist is kept in mind.

Anthropologically, I am Nietzschean.

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I do a lot of thinking, and I think hard about all my doing. I’m a reflective practitioner funhouse. Most days, it is wise to think thrice before asking me a simple question.

It is hard to live with me, especially before noon.