Ordinarily, I think about writing as a way to bring other people to where I am in my thinking. But my writing might be even more useful to me, as a path for going to where others are.
A path is not only for going to somewhere you are not. It is useful for traveling back and forth between points, each with its own views and ways.
I have never really made an attempt to summarize my own philosophy.
Mostly I just describe and explain the world from the standpoint of that philosophy. This is no accident. It actually connects to a central principle of my philosophy: My philosophy denies that philosophies can be described directly. Certainly philosophies have content, but the essence of a philosophy is practice. In philosophy (or at least the kinds of philosophy I favor) the content serves as a medium for practice.
For this reason, philosophies ought to be viewed primarily as demonstrations of alternative ways of thinking. A person who wishes to understand follows a thought, not only in order to grasp the factual content of that thought, but in order to learn how this kind of thinking is done. This is analogous to how a person might pick up a tune or join into a dance without explicitly thinking, memorizing and self-instructing. Of course, different people with different talents find intuitive participation easy with some types of activity and difficult with others, and this is true for intellectual subjects.
So in philosophy, comprehending the content of the philosophy is the goal of the work but not its purpose. The purpose is to learn how to do a particular kind of comprehension — a philosophical motion — so that kind of comprehension can be applied to similar problems. (This is why when scholars argue over what a philosopher really thought on this or that topic, it seems like what they are doing is only tangentially related to philosophy. And this is why I steer people away from reading surveys of philosophy. Such surveys tend to focus on the content of the thinking but omit the practices.)
I am going to go ahead post this as a possible first installment in an attempt to communicate my philosophy. More to come.
Years ago my sister and I were swimming in the ocean as a storm was coming in. The waves were huge and powerful. It was nearly impossible to move from the shallows where broken waves grappled in churning knots, out further to where the waves dropped one another in perpetual quarter-ton suplexes, and further still to where we wanted to be: the place where the curls were forming. Out there the waves were still simple, and their univocal thrust could lift us and carry us back over the violence and set us on shore. But the closer we got to the break line, the harder it was to stand upright and progress. We would get knocked off our feet and thrown to the bottom, and tumbled back into the foamy mud, our mouths and noses full of dirt and our bellies scored by shell fragments.
*
Where the water is deeper, it is more impersonal and disciplined; waves move through the ocean and the ocean feels the movement running through it. Each quart of water makes a patient circle like a rider on a ferris wheel, returning again and again to where it began.
But once the force of the wave hits resistance, everything gets personal. The water at the bottom is smashed into the sand; the water in the middle loses its balance and begins to topple; the water at the top is overthrown and falls on its face. Volumes of water compete to be the wave, to have the wave’s momentum. Every eddy strives to pull the rest of the ocean in its wake. A foaming brood of rivers coil, constrict, crush and swallow each other endlessly.
*
Somewhere between the calm power of the depths and the ambitions of the shallows, where the waves touch bottom with the tips of their toes, there is motion that can move us through or over the dirty spasms of everyday conflict to bring order where there are too many orders. But to get there we must wade, fight, get slammed, sliced up and set back by the very waves we hope to ride in.
The mezuzah is a Jewish Janus face, a point on the door we pass as we go out and as we come in. Hidden inside the mezuzah case is a binding principle of inside and outside.
As we go out we remember the kind of life we want to live out.
As we come in we remember the kind of home we want to live in.
I’ve put well over 10,000 hours of focused work into discovering where and how I’ve been wrong, and for the most part, the work has been highly successful.
Reading Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal, I am beginning to question my belief that my objections to what I’ve called left-illiberalism is really (as I had thought) bound up with its excessively egalitarian demands. Frank now has me wondering if my concerns might have more to do with an insufficient commitment to equality, and with the tonal side-effects of preserving one form of inequality through redirection of attention toward other alleged injustices.
It seems possible, if not likely, that a strong preference for diagnosing political conflicts in subtle psychological terms (of prejudices, conscious or unconscious, multiplied over innumerable judgments and biased interactions) could in fact be an evasion tactic for neglecting blunter policy issues that do not involve attempts at controlling what goes on inside other people’s heads — a jurisdiction that is, on principle, out of bounds, and protected in liberal democracies.
Could it be that obsessive preoccupations with racism, sexism, and the other prejudicial -isms might serve as a big stinky red herring that draws attention away from a thoroughly self-serving classism, the classism of a new class whose good conscience depends on not recognizing its own existence and its stake in preserving inequality? I’ve got to admit, Thomas Frank’s exposition of a self-deluded “professional class” strikes me as vastly more credible than the unconscious race-/sex-/orientation-interest narrative so popular in the vulgar left ditto-sphere.
Anyway, Thomas Frank has succeeded in making me question my 3rd Way centrist worldview and and interesting me in revisiting the New Deal. He’s also making me extra-extra-bitter that Bernie didn’t get the nomination.
I had unusually vivid dreams last night. I saw two identical bristling wolves drowning two identical boys in a crystal-clear winding river. Then I was trapped under mounds of trash beneath a sprawling trailer park, and I was trying to escape but kept falling over and sinking beneath tacky lawn decorations, cheap fencing and bbq grills. I was trying to get to my car, but when I finally got there it was stripped and the engine was gone.
For stylistic reasons I am considering adopting the term “realist” instead of “transcendent”. I mean the same thing by both words, though: they both refer to being that exists independently of our minds and therefore has the capacity to shock our expectations and our logic. Only active and receptive engagement — experiment — permits us relationship with this kind of being (as opposed to relationships with our own ideas of things, which is relationship between parts of our selves).
But concepts that refer to such relationships tend to degrade into ones that lend themselves to mental reduction.
Transcendence distorts toward arbitrary magic, but realism distorts toward rule-governed matter-of-factness. Real transcendence is between the two — approximate order with unpredictable interludes of inexplicability. When it comes to this kind of subject of thought, words empty faster than they can be made up.
I’ve been writing my own thematic index of Latour’s latest magnum opus (the 4th of his career, by my count), An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (or AIME). One of the most interesting of these themes is Transcendence.
Latour repeatedly points out a distinction between “mini-transcendences” that occur across all continuities and “maxi-transcendences” that stand unified above or behind reality, causing and unifying all things. For Latour, any unity is the hard-won result of numerous mini-transcendences, not the cause of some hidden, pre-existent, transcendent force orchestrating from another plane of being.
By making this distinction, and then expounding it by distinguishing fifteen different kinds of mini-transcendence, each with its own kind of trajectory and way of leaping (and many with their own version of maxi-transcendent, space-filling ghostly entity that usurps the role of causer and unifier), Latour is helping me sharpen and refine my own religious understanding, which sees the best ascetic denial in renunciation of big billowy grand gods, to better embrace the infinite God who approaches us in much smaller, less glamorous and more challenging ways every minute of the day.
It seems true to me that the kind of equality that matters most is legal equality — equality before the law.
To secure full, enduring equality before the law it is necessary that some degree of social equality be maintained. Severe social inequality will lead to unjust legislation and distorted law enforcement. This principle is demonstrated dramatically in America’s “war on drugs“.
But I so not see legal equality as a means to acheive actual social equality. At most it is a means to potential social equality — rough (and no more than rough) equality of opportunity. It is social equality that is the means to the end of equality before the law. This priority makes me hostile to any distinctions between categories of citizen in policy.
(Just to confuse things more, legal and social equality are different from political equality. Political equality is equality in ability to influence our collective actions, including our ability to move toward greater legal and/or social equality. Political equality also depends on social equality and preserving the right of citizens to organize in ways other than economic or governmental. Unions and public assemblies are vital to preserving or correcting the other kinds of equality. )
I think the stance I just outlined is basically conservative, but my concerns about social inequality interfering with legal (and political) equality pushes me past the middle point, into left-leaning regions of the political spectrum. At least, that is what I think.
A human being is one-third natural, one-third second-natural and one-third artificial.
A human being without second-natural and artificial elements is anti-natural: monstrous.
It is no accident and it is not mere convention that with thinking we say “I changed my mind” and with action we say “I changed my ways” but with morality we say “I had a change of heart.” Some things we do; other things are done to us. But what is done to us — what or who does this doing? Your response to this question indicates what might change if you were to have a change of heart.
Everybody who thinks thinks by way of a philosophy.
Few of us attempt to understand the philosophy that produces our idea of the world and every idea about the world — the interlocking of whole and parts. Few introspect.
Even fewer actively modify our own philosophies to see how our experience of the world changes when our philosophies — our root philosophies — our idea-producing ideas — change. Few change their worldview.
And fewer yet modify our own philosophies and try to practice what we’ve made, and how practice and experience lock together into a reinforcing circle or spiral. Now our idea-producing ideas produce new actions, which produce new results, new data, new ideas to make sense of the data, deep and surprising responses to what transpires. A new experience of life. Few change their lifeworld.
A change of mind, a change of ways, a change of heart.
This is what is at stake in philosophy.
*
Some people have little idea how philosophy as I describe it could be done, so they do not attempt it. The notion to try doesn’t occur in the first place, or it seems impossible so it is not attempted. This is for the best, most of the time.
Some do attempt it by reversing themselves on key opinion. They change sides from pro to con or con to pro, and now think the opposite of what they used to think. According to their philosophy — which was never touched and remains intact — they are converted.
But everyone does have a philosophy, and the less they realize it, the more they are dominated by it.
*
Is it an absurdity that the United States of America a nation founded by philosophers, whose foundation is a philosophy, has a powerful tradition of anti-intellectualism?
Or is it a necessity?
*
Even people who philosophize do their philosophizing with a philosophy, dominated by that philosophy. Philosophies behind philosophies behind philosophies — an inexhaustible regression.
Why do it?
I just realized I never re-posted my October 2010 article summarizing James Spradley’s incredibly cool way of defining different types of research — by the role of the participant vis a vis the researcher.
Here’s the text:
Anyone who has ever commissioned, designed, conducted research will find these common but thorny questions all too familiar:
These questions can be difficult to answer clearly, succinctly and definitively. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some kind of framework or model to help people understand how the various kinds of research (especially qualitative and quantitative fit together) to provide an organization what it needs to effectively engage and serve their customers?
James Spradley in The Ethnographic Interview provides such a framework. His approach is the identification of four different roles a research participant can play, each with a different relationship between researcher and participant and each producing a different kind of finding:
Over the course of a research program, research participants may at various times be regarded as subjects, actors or respondents — but if the goal is to know what really motivates the participants, to understand how to engage them at an emotional level, and to cultivate an enduring relationship with them, it makes a lot of sense to begin by relating to research participants as informants, beginning with unstructured or semi-structured interviews.
By starting with an informant relationship with research participants researchers can develop a better idea of what matters to the participants, how they conceptualize and speak about these things, and most importantly how this motivates observable behavior. These insights (that is, findings that illuminate the inner life of participants) can focus subsequent research on the most relevant and impactful questions. It also improves the execution of the research by helping researchers use language that’s natural and understandable to participants, earning greater trust and cooperation, and minimizing misunderstandings. And in analysis researchers and planners will mine more valid insights from the data, since they understand the motives, thought process and language behind the responses and behaviors of the respondents, actors and subjects. And the insights will be accurate because they rely far more on fact than (often unconscious) assumptions.
The other types of research can then report in more quantifiable terms, using much larger samples, how many subjects or actors perform certain behaviors or how many respondents give one answer or another to certain questions on a survey or questionnaire — and these actions and responses will now carry much more meaning because now the researchers have subjective insights to complement the objective data.
Two more points worth making: 1) I haven’t mentioned segmentation in this article, but anywhere where I mention learning about research participants, I am talking about learning about segments of participants (defined by goals, needs, attitudes and behaviors), and understanding the similarities and differences among them. 2) Generally, it is in the role of informant that research participants provide findings that drive design and creative. Informants inspire empathy and creative approaches. Subjects, respondents and actors tend to yield information useful in making strategy decisions. Using the full range of qualitative and quantitative research methods together intelligently can enable strategists and designers to work together more effectively to harness the full power of experience design.
By understanding research better — recognizing the difference between research that produces subjective insights and research that produces objective data, by not mistaking them for rival methods for producing the same kinds of findings, and by understanding how they can be used together to gain a holistic picture of one’s customers that is far more than the sum of the facts — an organization becomes more capable of understanding its customers without sacrificing their individuality to empty statistics.
S:
My view is that art is made without reference to the receiver.
It is entirely ego-centric.
It is thrown out into the world and if someone understands and desires it, it’s a miracle.
Design is made with reference to others — which is why real design is human-centered design.
I want my art self-centered and my design human-centered!
J:
I wouldn’t say, “miracle.”
What would commissioned work be? Artisan work?
S:
Depends on the benefactor
If the benefactor sees the artist’s vision and identifies with it (through that “miraculous” congeniality), it’s still art…
…but if the benefactor doesn’t know how to let the artist do the art, or the artist doesn’t know how to defend the art from the benefactor’s attempts to control the art, it becomes artisan work.
and here’s a new thought…
If a client doesn’t know how to let a designer do human-centered design or the designer doesn’t know how to defend the design from the client’s desire to control the design — what gets done is artisan work.
****
Update May 21, 2017:
3 types of participants in a creation:
3 categories of production:
Much pain in production arises from ambiguity or disagreement over the category of production. A sponsor believes what he is commissioning is primarily craftwork, being produced to his own personal satisfaction, when the producer thinks what is commissioned is either design or art. (A sponsor who lacks pluralistic awareness, due to autistic, narcissistic or naive realist tendencies, will not understand the difference between craft-work and anything else. It will simply become a control issue or clash of wills.) Or a producer is hired to work as a designer, but sees himself as the final judge of the work. (This is inevitable when the producer lacks pluralistic awareness).
Of course, most work is a hybrid of all three, located in the middle regions of a three-axis gamut stretched between art-work, design-work and artisan-work — but even minor disagreements in the balance point can generate strain.
People who hate the infinitude of reality have procrustean skulls. What refuses to fit inside the mind is chopped to fit or pulverized and poured in. (Transcendence is an experience — an intuition of otherness or beyondness they’ll tell you.) …Or exiled and attacked as an enemy, because you can have your enemy …Or exiled and worshipped, because you can have your religion, and your object of worship, too …Or dominated and trained to stay curled up tight in a brain-sized ball …Or failing these: annihilated.
Look where the violence is directed, and there you will find God. Look into the origin of the violence and there you will find the mind who needs to be the know-all, be-all and, if necessary, end-all.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton
Since last Saturday I’ve been obsessing on the concept of machloket, “sacred arguing”. I haven’t been this happy since I learned the word “agonism”.
Anyone who knows me well, knows that I hoard ideas. This is the root of my terrible book problem. Many of the books I’ve collected are really just husks for a single gorgeous statement. Certain ideas make me so desperately happy that I try to anchor them to this world in every way I know how. I buy books that properly express and enshrine the idea and then I put the book in its place in my library. I scan passages (and often entire books) into my wiki, cross-referencing, thematizing and weaving them into the rest of the electronic fabric I use to augment my brain, which is inadequate for my purposes. I write about these ideas, sketch diagrams of their structures, and honor them with geometry and typesetting. I buy up domains. I know I do not and can not possess them, but I try anyway.
I just had to stock up on machloket books.
This is a rambling mess, but I wanted to get the idea out… it probably should have gone into a private diary, but if you saw my traffic stats you’d understand that this blog pretty much is a private diary.
*
Inspired by feedback I have received, by recent events and by books I’ve read on the varieties of authoritarianism, I have been rethinking my old “newish political model” with new simpler language and with the addition of a third dimension.
In my new model, the dimensions are liberty, equality and fraternity — three of the four active ingredients of the famous battle-cry of the French Revolution, minus the last “or death” which was wisely dropped after the Reign of Terror.
This framework is rooted in the same Enlightenment values from which the American and French revolution grew, and makes no pretense of neutrality. But it has learned something from history about revolutionary extremism (even/especially extremism in service of liberal values) and has found guidance in the two sayings inscribed at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. “Know thyself” (because are all susceptible to self-privileging, especially when we appoint ourselves the enlightened dismantlers of it!) and “Everything in moderation” (which include even our own values!)
These values structure a political agenda, and despite the agenda’s principled modesty, it is not lukewarm. It is uncompromisingly moderate, because these values can only co-exist and co-flourish in moderation.
This framework is offered as a tool — an ideological lens — for seeing the world in a centrist liberal-democratic way. Someday maybe it will be a partisan tool for an as-yet unformed party who represents citizens holding a political position that has not yet found articulation or self-awareness.
As a partisan tool, it is not meant to do justice to all possible political positions. It is meant to strategically build bridges between previously separated positions, to drive wedges between previously allied positions that no longer share the most important values, and to encourage new alliances which have been obscured by how we define our current political positions, framed by the libertarian-biased and suddenly profoundly obsolete Political Compass model. (Seriously, where would you plot Bannon on the Political Compass? Or that other nazi wannabe guy who’s always prancing around with his Weimar hairdos, Roman salutes and “sly” Goebbels references? Authoritarian Left? Come on.)
The purpose of this model is to rally centrists committed to liberty and justice for all against those committed to liberty and justice for few at the expense of all others. Anyone in the latter category should definitely object to this conspicuous biases of this model. It does not do them justice, because it is not meant to, because I’m not interested in extending justice to illegitimate positions. It is meant to drive illiberals back into the margins, and, if possible all the way back into their moms’ basements.
I don’t know how to draw this, yet. For now I will describe the three axes that define the conceptual space within which political positions are situated.
As this is a highly-biased Centrist model, the extremes of each axis is cast as either +) untenable or -) evil. The 0) point is defined as the most desirable point sought between the extremes.
Liberty (individual autonomy): freedom of individuals versus authority of collectivities. Who determines how an individual is to think, feel and act?
+) an individual alone determines individual being;
-) the collectivity determines individual being;
0) at the center an individual determines individual being within reasonable limits set by a collectivity.
What kinds of collectivity are we talking about? According to this model any group capable of imposing its will on an individual is considered a collectivity capable of curtailing individual liberty. This differs from Political Compass, which views liberty as curtailed primarily by the federal government.
And what are reasonable limits? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.
Equality (power distribution): desirability of equality versus desirability of rank. How much disparity of power among individuals is acceptable and ideal?
+) each individual is given the same power and resources as every other;
-) each individual is given different amounts of power and resources according to rank;
0) at the center every individual is guaranteed a fair opportunity to acquire power and resources.
What kinds of rank are we talking about? According to this model every value system ranks differently and imposes rank according to its own logic. Societies can rank-stratify by family, class, wealth, race, education, talent, temperament, party membership — anything to which the word “deserve” can be applied. This differs from Political Compass, which casts equality issues in terms of government regulation.
And what is fair? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.
Fraternity (scope of obligation): universalist/globalist obligation versus tribalism/nationalism obligation.
+) in-groups and out-groups are abolished and moral obligation is extended to all of humanity (or even all living beings);
-) in-group membership is sharply defined and moral obligation is confined to the in-group;
0) at the center in-groups and out-groups are defined and moral obligations exist for each but in differing degrees.
How are in-groups and out-groups defined? According to this model in-groups self-define according to whatever criteria seems most relevant to the group. Examples of in-group determinants include place of origin, place of residence, citizenship, race, class, religion, ideology, party-membership. Political Compass does not consider the dimension of fraternity, because fraternity is largely invisible unless one is denied obligation due to out-group status.
And what are the in- and out-groups, and what is our degree of obligation to them? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.
For the last several months I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s epic The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a three part work that begins with histories of both antisemitism and imperialism, which set the stage for her analysis of the phenomenon of totalitarianism.
It has taken me a couple of months to get to the third part. (I actually started the book mainly for the first. Long story.) What stands out most is how nuanced Arendt’s vocabulary is around tyrannical forms of government. For her, totalitarianism is different from dictatorship, despotism, right-wing authoritarianism, and others I havent bothered inventorying (yet). I feel like an Ecuadorian learning the 50 Eskimo words for snow.
It has made me realize that we Americans are so anxious about our freedom that we “other” all illiberal forms of government into a giant miscellaneous category of unfree political orders which we label with more or less synonymous pejoratives, all of which threaten us with a variety of terrifying impressionistic possibilities drawn from books, movies and History Channel specials. Most of us have vague (and, I am realizing mythologically deformed) understandings of how these various forms of government look (even from the outside, much less from within!), how they emerge and develop, or what specific factors and conditions support their rise or suppression. Nor do we understand the psychology of the various types of actors who collaborate and clash in these situations.
Yet, somehow — everyone thinks they do already know, at least in outline. Nobody can be told anything that runs counter to their gut sense of reality. Everybody is busy, needs to keep their heads down, needs to tend to their own lives… I’m learning from Arendt that this is part of the phenomenon.