When encountering a new concept, I ask:
The following is more of a diary entry than an article. I have put too little effort into editing, and it might make sense only to me. I just wanted to get a snapshot of these ideas as they exist today, before they change or disappear.
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The start of an idea: it seems that many “linguistic turn” philosophers become anxious encountering any concept that fails to promise eventual public accessibility and acceptance. I have a hunch I cannot yet support but this all seems rooted in a binary either-or of private and public: EITHER we speak precisely, logically and empirically in the least ambiguous language possible, OR we speak a muddledly, and self-sentence ourselves to imprisonment within our own private language cells.
I do love the private-public distinction and find it useful, but I think the most fascinating varieties of philosophy are between these extremes, in a region that could be called intimate, or what Martin Buber called the interhuman. This is where Nietzsche works, and I may read him with this theme in mind on my next tour of his corpus.
The intimate is where poetry happens. When poetry goes public it is lost to prosaicism. When poetry goes private it is lost to insanity. Poetry is intimacy suspended between insanity and prosaicism.
It is not true (or at least not right) that all language aims to be explicit. Sorting out the purpose of a particular vocabulary and determining its degree of explicit monosemic and pregnant polysemic content is an interesting problem — and less a philosophical problem than a design problem.
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Speaking of various kinds of problems, I’ve done much reflection in the last couple of years on what distinguishes engineering problems and design problems (my most recent formulation: an engineering problem concerns systemization of rule-bound entities, where a design problem concerns hybrid rule-bound and choice-making entities), but I have also been thinking quite a bit about the relationship between design and philosophy. It might be my most radical idea that philosophy is best understood as a species of design, and how it is designed determines what it can do. (I see a philosophy as a mind-reality interface analogous to a computer user interface to support intelligibility of unmanageable truths and semi-obscure phenomena. Philosophy-as-design strikes me as the furthest consequence of Jamesian Pragmatism.)
It might be interesting to converge these two themes, philosophy-as-design and design-vs-engineering. It might go like this: maybe we have been accidentally designing philosophies optimized for solving engineering problems, and further, when we think about philosophy in these engineering terms we successively engineer the possibility of design out of of our philosophies. We trust only logical rules that compel reason to accept a single conclusion, or the problem does not compute and returns a syntax error. We engineer philosophies good only for engineering, and this has distorted our understanding of what a science is and can be, including the social sciences. This is why 20th Century social sciences and social engineering are linked: social engineering was all that could be done with the philosophy that thought the social sciences.
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I’ve been groping with a vague new thought. Generally we define sciences ontologically, by their object of study. What if we defined sciences pragmatically, by the types of technologies they produce? The pragmatic definition of Actor-Network Theory then might be: the science that produces design. 20th Century sociology might be: the science that produces social engineering.
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For the past few years I’ve been enamored with (or maybe dominated by) Bruno Latour’s account of science and technology, and particularly his refusal to separate the domains of science and technology. Sciences use technologies at least as much as technologies use science. There is no pure scientific learning followed by pure technological application.
My intuition harasses me with the question of whether there is (or ought to be!) a similar dynamic at work in the social sciences. Currently the social sciences seem (I am not as well-informed as I would like to be) to place enormous emphasis on the front-end observational hypothesis-formation segment of the scientific method. Where is the interactive experimental moment of the scientific method, where technologies are employed to generate more knowledge? And what exactly is a social science technology, anyway? Have we asked that question enough? I am leaning toward a belief that a social science technology is a design, and in an experimental setting it is a design prototype introduced into a social situation. The social sciences merge with human-centered design practices. Not as the pure understanding that precedes a pure application, but as a profoundly mingled reciprocity.
My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.
With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.
With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.
I plan to use this diagram to help me explain different approaches to design strategy.
Human-centered design helps Douche organizations become Keepers.
Truth is even more about potential actualities than it is about realities.
“Truthfulness. — I favor any skepticism to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”: for there courage has lost its right.”
“The thing itself” does not only refer to a present thing, but more, its reservoir of possible surprises for the future.
“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.“
Anticipation is always present.
I would like to write these:
The Ten-Thousand Everythings
From Correspondence to Coresponse
Imagining a Better Scientism
A Book of Peculiar Prayer
Ambidextrous Liberalism
Philosophy as Design
Practicable Utopias: a Social Design Primer
Overcoming Engineering
Knowledge Design
But would anyone want to read them?
Some gems from C. S. Peirce’s “What Pragmatism Is”.
First, probably the most famous bit from this essay, one of the funnier lines in the history of philosophy:
…the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism,” which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.
Another, which I think is highly relevant to the Design Thinking debate, largely conducted by non-practitioners:
The writer of this article has been led by much experience to believe that every physicist, and every chemist, and, in short, every master in any department of experimental science, has had his mind molded by his life in the laboratory to a degree that is little suspected. The experimentalist himself can hardly be fully aware of it, for the reason that the men whose intellects he really knows about are much like himself in this respect. With intellects of widely different training from his own, whose education has largely been a thing learned out of books, he will never become inwardly intimate, be he on ever so familiar terms with them; for he and they are as oil and water, and though they be shaken up together, it is remarkable how quickly they will go their several mental ways, without having gained more than a faint flavor from the association. Were those other men only to take skillful soundings of the experimentalist’s mind — which is just what they are unqualified to do, for the most part — they would soon discover that, excepting perhaps upon topics where his mind is trammeled by personal feeling or by his bringing up, his disposition is to think of everything just as everything is thought of in the laboratory, that is, as a question of experimentation. … when you have found, or ideally constructed upon a basis of observation, the typical experimentalist, you will find that whatever assertion you may make to him, he will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say.
And last, a restatement of a simple but profoundly consequential idea from “Four Incapacities” (“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”) which hit me from a pleasantly fresh angle:
Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is. One proposes that you shall begin by doubting everything, and says that there is only one thing that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were “as easy as lying.” … Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth. Here breaks in Mr. Make Believe: “What! Do you mean to say that one is to believe what is not true, or that what a man does not doubt is ipso facto true?” No, but unless he can make a thing white and black at once, he has to regard what he does not doubt as absolutely true. Now you, per hypothesiu, are that man, “But you tell me there are scores of things I do not doubt. I really cannot persuade myself that there is not some one of them about which I am mistaken.” You are adducing one of your make-believe facts, which, even if it were established, would only go to show that doubt has a limen, that is, is only called into being by a certain finite stimulus. You only puzzle yourself by talking of this metaphysical “truth” and metaphysical “falsity,” that you know nothing about. All you have any dealings with are your doubts and beliefs, with the course of life that forces new beliefs upon you and gives you power to doubt old beliefs. If your terms “truth” and “falsity” are taken in such senses as to be definable in terms of doubt and belief and the course of experience (as for example they would be, if you were to define the “truth” as that to a belief in which belief would tend if it were to tend indefinitely toward absolute fixity), well and good: in that case, you are only talking about doubt and belief. But if by truth and falsity you mean something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any way, then you are talking of entities of whose existence you can know nothing, and which Ockham’s razor would clean shave off. Your problems would he greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to know the “Truth,” you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt.
(Another pass at my design vs engineering concept. It remains un-nailed. It’s important, though, so I will continue to spiraling into the gravitational center of this perspective until I find the standpoint from which it is best said.)
Social engineering failed and will always fail, not because it is hubristic for humanity to try to shape and regulate its own existence, but because it conceives of society in engineering terms — as an engine, functioning mechanically, with well-understood technical requirements.
Social design, however, could very well succeed, at least in certain contexts. Design pays attention to more than function and form. It pays attention to what happens when systems are partially composed of free-willed beings who should not be compelled to behave mechanically.
In order for social engineering to work, human beings must be compelled to behave mechanically — that is, forced to comply with roles and adhere to rules — that allow the system to function efficiently and predictably, like a well-oiled machine.
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I am coming to believe the word “design” is most useful as an antithesis to “engineering” — an antithesis defined within the broad category of “intentional efforts to make changes to the world”.
Sometimes I worry that graduate school is a form of aversion therapy cure students of all enthusiasm for a subject of study.
Other times I think graduate school is a test of a person’s passion for a subject of study. It is less a process of mastering the subject itself than a way to discover once and for all whether one has the love and will required to eventually master it.
This last story shows that the people of Ombrosa, who before had been teeming with gossip about my brother’s love life, now, faced with this passion exploding as it were above their heads, maintained a dignified reserve, as if toward something bigger than themselves. Not that they did not criticize the Marchesa’s conduct; but more for its exterior aspects, such as that breakneck galloping of hers (“Where can she be going, at such a pace?”) and that continual hoisting of furniture on to treetops. There was already an air among them of considering it all just as one of the nobles’ ways, one of their many idiosyncrasies. (“All up trees, nowadays; women, men. What’ll they think of next?”) In fact, times were coming that were to be more tolerant, but also more hypocritical.
Applied natural science is engineering.
Applied worldview is poetry.
Applied social science is design.
Excerpt from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes
of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general
impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking
by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which
turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.
I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you
imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly
was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied
with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero
of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for.
…But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in
a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht.
I discovered England. … When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.
It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original;
but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy
of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from
the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was
the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own;
and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
was orthodoxy.
Nothing is improved when we replace worldviews with wordworlds.
To paraphrase Bernadette from the Jerk, “It’s not [the meanings] I’ll miss. It’s the stuff!”
Our problem is not metaphysics. It is metaphysical reductionism. And specifically metaphysical reductionisms that allow us to be individually solipsistic with our eyes, or collectively solipsistic with our ears. If we get our hands involved and through interacting with the myriad beings around us, permit a fluid and indeterminately multidimensional metaphysic to stand beyond our capacity to conceptualize — one whose essence is to occasionally shock us — we’ll be better able to live in a real world.
I really cannot read more minds-in-vats. ANT has ruined me.
“The Dream of Coleridge”
The lyrical fragment “Kubla Khan” (fifty-odd rhymed and irregular verses of exquisite prosody) was dreamed by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge on a summer day in 1797. Coleridge writes that he had retired to a farm near Exmoor; an indisposition obliged him to take a sedative; sleep overcame him a few moments after he had read a passage from Purchas describing the construction of a palace by Kubla Khan, the emperor who was made famous in the West by Marco Polo. In the dream the lines that had been read casually germinated and grew; the sleeping man perceived by intuition a series of visual images and, simultaneously, the words that expressed them. After a few hours he awoke with the certainty that he had composed, or received, a poem of about three hundred verses. He remembered them with singular clarity and was able to write down the fragment that is now part of his work. An unexpected visitor interrupted him and afterward he was unable to remember any more. To his no small surprise and mortification, although he still retained “some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” Coleridge wrote.
Swinburne felt that what he had been able to salvage was the supreme example of music in the English language, and that to try to analyse it would be like trying to unravel a rainbow (the metaphor belongs to John Keats). Summaries or descriptions of poetry whose principal virtue is music are useless and would only defeat our purpose; so then let us merely remember that Coleridge was given a page of undisputed splendor in a dream.
Although the case is quite extraordinary, it is not unique. In the psychological study The World of Dreams Havelock Ellis has compared it to the case of the violinist and composer, Giuseppe Tartini, who dreamed that the Devil (his slave) was playing a prodigious sonata on the violin; when the dreamer awoke he played Tritio del Diavolo from memory. Another classic example of unconscious cerebration is that of Robert Louis Stevenson; as he himself has related in his “Chapter on Dreams,” one dream gave him the plot of Olalla and another, in 1884, the plot of Jekyll and Hyde. Tartini undertook to imitate the music he had heard in a dream. Stevenson received outlines of plots from his dreams. More akin to Coleridge’s verbal inspiration is the inspiration attributed by the Venerable Bede to Caedmon {Historia ecclesiastica genlis Anglorum, IV, 24}. The case occurred at the end of the seventh century in the missionary and warring England of the Saxon kingdoms. Caedmon was an uneducated herdsman and was no longer young; one night he slipped away from a festive gathering because he knew that they would pass the harp to him and he knew also that he could not sing. He fell asleep in the stable near the horses, and in a dream someone called him by name and told him to sing. Caedmon replied that he did not know how to sing, but the voice said, “Sing about the origin of created things.” Then Caedmon recited verses he had never heard before. He did not forget them when he awoke, and was able to repeat them to the monks at the nearby monastery of Hild. Although he did not know how to read, the monks explained passages of sacred history to him and he ruminated on them like a clean animal and converted them into delightful verses. He sang about the creation of the world and man and the story of Genesis; the Exodus of the children of Israel and their entrance into the Promised Land; the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Lord; the coming of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of the Apostles; and also the terror of the Last Judgment, the horror of Infernal Punishments, the delights of Heaven, and the graces and punishments of God. He was the first sacred poet of the English nation. Bede wrote that no one equaled him because be did not learn from men, but from God. Years later he foretold the hour of his death and awaited it in sleep. Let us hope that he met his angel again.
At first glance the dream of Coleridge may appear to be less astonishing than his precursor’s. “Kubla Khan” is an admirable composition, and the principal merit of the nine-line hymn dreamed by Caedmon is that its origin was in a dream; but Coleridge was already a poet while Caedmon’s vocation was revealed to him. Nevertheless, a later event makes the marvel of the dream in which “Kubla Khan” was engendered even more mysterious. If it is true, the story of Coleridge’s dream began many centuries before Coleridge and has not yet ended.
The poet’s dream occurred in 1797 (some say 1798), and he published his account of the dream in 1816 as a gloss or a justification of the unfinished poem. Twenty years later the first western version of one of those universal histories that are so abundant in Persian literature appeared in Paris, in fragmentary form—the General History of the World by Rashid al-Din, which dates from the fourteenth century. One line reads as follows; “East of Shang-tu, Kubla Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory.” Rashid al-Din was the Vizir of Ghazan Mahmud, a descendant of Kubla.
A thirteenth-century Mongolian emperor dreams a palace and then builds it according to his dream; an eighteenth-century English poet (who could not have known that the structure was derived from a dream) dreams a poem about the palace. In comparison with this symmetry, which operates on the souls of sleeping men and spans continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books are not so extraordinary.
But how shall we explain it? Those who automatically reject the supernatural (I try, always, to belong to this group) will claim that the story of the two dreams is merely a coincidence, a chance delineation, like the outlines of lions or horses we sometimes see in clouds. Others will argue that the poet somehow found out that the Emperor had dreamed the palace, and then said he had dreamed the poem in order to create a splendid fiction that would also palliate or justify the truncated and rhapsodic quality of the verses. {At the beginning of the nineteenth century or at the end of the eighteenth, judged by readers of classical taste, “Kubla Khan” was much more outrageous than it is now. In 1881 Coleridge’s Erst biographer, Traill, could still write: “The extravagant dream poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is little more than a psychological curiosity.”} That conjecture seems reasonable, but it obliges us to postulate, arbitrarily, a text not identified by Sinologists in which Coleridge was able to read, before 1816, about Kubla’s dream. {See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927), pp. 358, 585.} Hypotheses that transcend reason are more appealing. One such theory is that the Emperor’s soul penetrated Coleridge’s, enabling Coleridge to rebuild the destroyed palace in words that would be more lasting than marble and metal.
The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace. The similarity of the dreams reveals a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman performer. To inquire the purpose of that immemorial or long-lived being would perhaps be as foolhardy as futile, but it seems likely that he has not yet achieved it. In 1691 Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of the palace of Kubla Khan; we know that scarcely fifty lines of the poem were salvaged. Those facts give rise to the conjecture that the series of dreams and labors has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If the plan does not fail, some reader of “Kubla Khan” will dream, on a night centuries removed from us, of marble or of music. This man will not know that two others also dreamed. Perhaps the series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one who dreams will have the key.
After writing all this, I perceive—or think that I perceive—another explanation. Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to men, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term), is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation was the palace; its second was the poem. Whoever compared them would have seen that they were essentially the same.
– Jorge Luis Borges
I am not exactly enjoying the first chapter of Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being, but I am finding it valuable.
Levinas’s use of the word “exception” is fascinating, and I think I am going to adopt it for my own work.
One thing I believe he is saying: we tend to make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.
Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most literal possible way, when it tries to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.
In my own religious vision, this category mistake, made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and only then, as a consequence, at the explicit and conscious level is the Edenic Fall. Human nature is less perverse than it is everse.
Our innate incapacity to stop incessantly committing this mistake is why we must incessantly repent.
It is this belief that makes me answer “Judeo-Christian” when asked my religious orientation. Mine is a metaphysic of infinite shock.
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A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.
The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.
The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.
Did Levinas write anything that wasn’t a rebuke to Heidegger?
Levinas : Heidegger :: Nietzsche : Wagner
Is it just me, or do the conceptions of logocentrism outlined in my Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory seem logocentric?
Logocentrism – The Greek logos has a wide range of meanings, and designates both a rational or intelligible principle and a structure or order that provides phenomena with an origin, or that explains their nature. Hence the common use of the suffix ‘ology’ to designate a branch of study or knowledge, as in ‘psychology’, literally meaning ‘the study of the soul’. The related verb legein means ‘say’, ‘tell’ or ‘count’. Aristotle uses logos to mean the rational principle or element of the soul, as opposed to the irrational principle of DESIRE (Nicomachean Ethics I.13). In Christian theology, the logos becomes the Word that was with God and that was made flesh when it was incarnated in Christ. The opening verse of the fourth Gospel provides the most sublime example of logocentrism: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John ii.1).
The critique of logocentrism is a central feature of DERRIDA’s DECONSTRUCTION. According to Derrida (1967a), Western philosophy from Plato onwards has always been logocentric in that it makes speech, or the logos, the origin and site of truth, and privileges the phonic aspect of language at the expense of the graphic aspect of WRITING. Speech, that is, is assumed to be the spontaneous and complete means of expression available to a SUBJECT who is self-present in the sense of being self-transparent, self-conscious and self-sufficiently rational. Logocentrism assumes that spoken language is an adequate expression of preexisting ideas and that writing is merely a secondary or even parasitic SUPPLEMENT to speech. The Saussurean theology of the SIGN (see also SAUSSURE) is a classic instance of logocentrism which locates meaning in the perfect coincidence between a sound (signifier) and an idea or image (signified). Ultimately, such a theory is a return to the biblical thesis that ‘In the beginning was the Word’, and it implies the existence of a primal or transcendental signifier which is the origin of all meaning. According to Derrida, logocentrism, and the related PHONOCENTRISM, is a form of ETHNOCENTRISM, or even the original and most powerful form of ethnocentrism, because it privileges westem phonetic alphabets over all other forms of writing and makes Western reason (logos) the sole criterion for knowledge.
This seems to me to the words of men privileged to dedicate themselves to lives of letters and discourse, and thereby sentencing themselves to lives of letters and discourse about letters and discourse with others who live similar lives.
Or maybe I am just trying to find privilege in my bondage to everyday practical concern.
In my life — a designerly life — reason, language, and argumentation result not in publications and citations, but rather in the shape a medical device will take, the arrangement of elements on a screen, or rooms in a building, how a database is structured, how business will be conducted, the stories people will tell one another or unconsciously perform, whether each of us is able to do work in a way that makes sense to us or if some of us are forced to proceed in a way that is unnatural and awkward, whether time or money runs out, and a project fails (or more often, embezzles resources from private lives).
In my designerly life logic matters some of the time and not that much. More than anything, it is the confident tone of sound logic, the essence of truthiness in truth, that lends force to logic. Arguments are decided by other forces — money, charisma, will, determination, composure.
Philosophically what matters most is the phronetic grokking of some semi-alien form of life and working through its implications, not with written ethnographic reports but with concrete artifacts that will change lives of those who accept them into their lives. This line of thought always leads me to a beautiful passage from Clifford Gerrtz, which I like to extend:
From Clifford Geertz’s “From the Native’s Point of View”:
“…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.”
[To which I add: “Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them. A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.]
“Truly” is threefold.
Truly means a truth is really, actually and genuinely true.
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I have also considered “authentic” as an alternative to “genuine” but genus evokes my intended meaning better than autos, especially in light of this pretty etymological entry from my dictionary:
1596, from L. genuinus “native, natural,” from root of gignere “beget” (see genus), perhaps infl. in form by contrasting adulterinus “spurious.” Alternative etymology is from L. genu “knee,” from an ancient custom of a father acknowledging paternity of a newborn by placing it on his knee.
A language game is part of a lifeworld, and a lifeworld is a rite understood through participation.
If one extracts the linguistic component of a rite and participates solely in that aspect, one may partially understand, or totally understand — which is indistinguishable from totally misunderstanding, unless one trusts the indignation of the misunderstood.
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A digression:
Ideologues know better. Indignation is denial of truth.
Seeing indignation this way is the cornerstone of ideology.
When this fact is pointed out to the ideologue, he is indignant, but in fact he is in denial of the truth of ideology.
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The day comes when we can no longer defend ourselves. Our positions immobilize and stiffen, and we are laid bare. The mobile and supple dance around our prostrate legacy, examining, analyzing, delineating, and legitimately knowing better.
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Anaximander, again?
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.