All posts by anomalogue

The creativity of agnonism

Philosophy

The predominance of war or appeasement undermines the creative accomplishments of diplomacy.

The predominance of corporate capitalism or communism undermines the creative accomplishments of politics — and the market.

The predominance of collectivism or individualism undermines the creative accomplishments of friendship.

The predominance of conviction or skepticism undermines the creative accomplishments of philosophy.

The predominance of lust or alienation undermines the creative accomplishments of love.

The predominance of intolerance or tolerance undermines the creative accomplishments of religion.

And so on.

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Releasing ourselves from the painful tension of internal conflict by neutralizing one force to liberate another — it gives us energy and all the answers — but the foundation it provides is less fundamental than it is base.

 

 

Art in the age of work

Philosophy

I just stumbled upon a very relevant passage from The Wanderer and His Shadow:

Art in the age of work. — We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. — This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of the industrious and able against it, it is directed to the conscienceless and lazy, who, however, are in accordance with their nature unfavourably inclined precisely towards grand art and feel the claims it makes to be presumptuous. It may therefore be that grand art is facing its end from lack of air and the room to breathe it: unless, that is, grand art tries, through a kind of coarsening and disguising, to become at home in (or at least to endure) that other air which is in reality the natural element only of petty art, of the art of recreation and distraction. And this is now happening everywhere; artists of grand art too now promise recreation and distraction, they too direct their attentions to the tired and weary, they too entreat of them the evening hours of their working day — just as do the artists of entertainment, who are content to have achieved a victory over the serious brow and the sunken eye. What artifices, then, do their greater comrades employ? They have in their dispensary the mightiest means of excitation capable of terrifying even the half-dead; they have narcotics, intoxicants, convulsives, paroxysms of tears: with these they overpower the tired and weary, arouse them to a fatigued overliveliness and make them beside themselves with rapture and terror. On account of the perilousness of these means it employs, ought one to denounce grand art in the forms in which it now exists — opera, tragedy and music — as the most deceitful of sinners? Not at all: for it would a hundred times prefer to dwell in the pure element of the quietness of morning and address itself to the expectant, wakeful, energetic soul. Let us be grateful to it that it has consented to live as it does rather than flee away: but let us also admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.

Why design research is the greatest

Philosophy

Why do I love design research? Two reasons:

  1. Design research often destroys existing knowledge and expertise,  creating new philosophical problems (as Wittgenstein elegantly defined it: “I don’t know my way about”). This is what I do.
  2. Design research produces social solidarity. When a team observes the same realities, reflects together, produces hypotheses and prototypes together and tests them together, and develops a “common sense” — the members of the team become friends in a uniquely substantial way. It is the exact opposite of loneliness.

Why should companies love design research? Two reasons:

  1. Problems that defy existing knowledge and expertise are the ones with the most innovation potential. Radically new problems produce the most radical, freshest-feeling innovations. Design research exposes these new expertise-resistant problems.
  2. The team alignment resulting from design research creates more cohesive, efficient and inspired teams.

 

The intolerable span

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

If something is lacking in an organization, the deficit rarely persists from simple unavailability of whatever is missing. More often the deficit is actively maintained, either from a direct allergy or an indirect displacement.

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People and organizations selectively include and exclude people, ideas, practices — this is how they preserve themselves as the being they are.

When something is introduced that cannot be simply subsumed or appended to what already is there — if a new entity requires deep change of political structure, of conceptual framing, of habits — the organization will repel that thing as a threat to its existence.

This is why organizational change is so hard. Organizations want to persist — to survive and grow and thrive in its own way, just like every individual biological organism wants to survive and grow and thrive.

And this is also how it is with individual souls. A soul knows in a wordlessly certain way that deep change is death. A soul can detect even the faintest trace of deep change in an idea.

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A soul can find many ways to excuse itself. We lead very busy lives. The more important I am, the busier I am, and the more brusque I am permitted to be. The important man is allowed more and more to fend off anything new. This is why the weak get smarter and the powerful become more… conservative.

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Of course, deep change is also ground-clearing for rebirth, but it is impossible to believe in such things: only faith suffices.

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If you think you know something that another person needs to know, please understand: there is probably a good reason this person does not yet know.

If you think you have a talent or skill some other organization needs but does not have, please understand: there is probably a good reason this organization does not have this capability.

And if you have discovered a disruptive insight, do not be fooled into believing that people will be grateful for it. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is mere aversion to risk that makes people resist. Do not be fooled by any functionalist explanation: the aversion is instinctive fear of death: dread.

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A bit from the book I am writing, The Ten-Thousand Everythings:

We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.

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Do you know it when you are confronting the dread of a truly new thing?

Do you know your way across the intolerable span?

Can you want to cross it?

3rd-place-mercury

 

Passenger

Philosophy

A person who is self-interested and unconcerned with what anyone thinks about it, will sometimes have a change of heart and become intensely other-interested.

Such a person believes he has experienced a conversion and has arrived at genuine concern for the other, when in fact he has taken only a baby-step.

A painful journey lies ahead.

The first leg of the journey is realizing that his change of heart and sacrifice of “self-interests” is mere preparation for a far greater sacrifice.

The second leg is wrestling with whether he is truly prepared to pay such a price. He had no idea what — and even less, who — was at stake.

In the third leg, he must calculate whether he even can afford to complete his journey once he has paid what turns out to be the fare. As he looks up from his tallying, he sees for the first time the reproachful glances of the other passengers who have paid their way.

In the fourth leg, he digs deep and pays up. Now he begins to move.

 

Another origin myth

Fables, myths & parables

What seemed to be the solid earth was surveyed, and it was discovered to be an island, and not a very large one. It was in fact a very tiny island. It bobbed and swayed and creaked. The thin planks under his feet had never been rock. And the planks were flimsy and began to dissolve. Soon his only support was the foamy film of the ocean’s surface. He flailed and grabbed at the sky and found clouds strangely substantial in his grip. He pulled and kicked and rose upward. But it wasn’t the clouds pulling him upward, it was the day itself. He was swimming into the sky in the clarity of azure. As the sun set, he continued to rise. Gold and purple, green and translucent twilight carried his body outward. But as stars appeared in the firmament and snowflakes sparkled on his skin, he felt the memory of weight and a welcome tug on his body; a descent and the touch of ground under his feet. The earth was there again, founded on an uninterrupted plain, solid, and permanent. And the people standing there beside him on the rock had never left, their feet were planted in this ground, and they had never been wrong.

Rethinking totalities

Hermeneutics

The problem with totalities is not that they are total — it is that totalities are so often reductive or aggressive.

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The worst totalities are excessively inclusionary and exclusionary at the same time: kill and eat it, or get far, far away from it. Fight or flight, and nothing in-between.

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Perhaps if we were to entertain totalities as subtotals, or treat horizons as something that can fall in a range between accidental and insubstantial artifact of standpoint and an impregnable wall we must faithfully tend and defend, we could enjoy some relative stability of identity with minimal aggression. Perhaps it is a matter of material — a permeable membrane or a transparent shell — or shape — a spiral or a circle with a mouth.

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But actually — more and more I resist conceptualizing understanding in terms of horizons. Horizons are seen, and entities are seen against horizons and put in perspective through a vision. This whole family of analogues promotes an ocular notion of knowledge.

Some knowledge is of things known at a distance, but much of knowledge is kinesthetic and/or participatory. As much as eye-awareness dominates hearing-awareness, both positively obliterate touch-awareness, scent- and taste-awareness, and these obliterated awarenesses are primary faculties in philosophy.

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Common sense was originally not “what everybody believes in common” but rather that sense of reality that arises from interpreting and synthesizing all sense data. The conflation of these two very different meanings into a single word is a symptom of deep philosophical naivety.

More symptomatic distortions: “materialism”, “idealism”, “realism”, “pragmatism”, “paradigm shift”, “experience”…

The mundane world has an uncanny appetite for words it cannot digest, a need to grip in its stumpy little fingers what is ungraspable. It can’t understand it, and it won’t understand it — yet, it cannot leave it alone. It’s like a young boy overwhelmed by his first crush…

He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to “show off” in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some time; but by-and-by, while he was in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. . . . He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, “showing off,” as before; but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

 

Who can innovate?

Design

For all I know the innovation consultants are right that anybody can innovate.

But I will insist on adding one stipulation: anyone who really wants to can innovate.

“Really wants to” means wanting everything that goes with innovation — non-linearity, doubt, anxiety,  ambiguity and profound disorientation.

Wanting all the conditions of innovation might be something not that many people can want, despite wanting to have the output.

A month of coins

Fables, myths & parables

A month of coins purchased what? An explanation for an inexplicable abhorrence left in the wake of defied expectation. A base motive is better than no motive.

*

Compare me to something and tell me what I am like.”

The first said to him, “You are like a just messenger.”

The second said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”

The third said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.

*

“…Thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

An image made this pale man pale.”

Self-seeker

Philosophy

Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is fortified with a confabulated plot which displaces the dream’s truth, but makes the dream memorable.

*

Dreams are unintentional, undisciplined, unformed.

Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to proceed by accident — but chaos is as immemorable as a speech in a foreign language.

*

We remember words, images, forms. We remember by words, by images, by forms. If we do not form reality as it occurs, and derive forms from reality as it occurs — collaborate with reality to instaurate truth — reality escapes and vanishes and we must imagine truth like fiction authors, or lose ourselves to amnesia.

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A life lived without intent, without discipline, and without articulation is in some ways is truer to life than one lived in the artifice of faith, routine and language. Reality is permitted to remain real: unprocessed experience.

But human nature abhors a vacuum. A self demands a history, an I, a future. It is of past-present-future that a self is made and it is by this that a self endures.

If one does not impose self on reality in the moment, it becomes necessary to do so later after the fact, after reality has receded into oblivion on a stream of babble — after reality has evaporated like a dream and is no longer present to represent itself.

Past is fictionalized. And since the future forms itself from past, future is also fictionalized. And consequentially, self is fictionalized.

*

Seeking self as an activity separated from trying to understand this world and the beings who inhabit it, is guaranteed to prolong the quest forever, and to deprive the search not only of any possible resolution, but of all sense.

People who think they must “find themselves” before they can move on to other questions, are guaranteeing that they will find neither, because the self is found by finding the world.

Midas touch v.2

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

“What can be counted is an instance of a category,” thought Midas.

And he reflected on gold, “Is it gold I really love? Or is it the quantity of gold that I have counted that makes my face glow with pleasure?

And he turned to look at his wife and asked, “Is this crazy woman inside my Queen the one I adore? Or do I love this one (1) I can count on to be my good wife, my good queen, the effective mother of my daughters?

“And how do I love her? Let me count the ways! And does not each way have a name and criteria by which it can be classified as that which it essentially is? Let me count the number of instances of each of the ways I love her!” exclaimed Midas.

“And is it my car I love? Or do I love driving? I love acceleration, speed, torque. My love for my car equals its best-of-breed specifications.”

“I used to love insatiably and helplessly, because I did not know how to eat. My mistake was I loving most what I could least digest: the inert permanence of gold.

“One cannot own what is not made one’s own flesh, and my mind’s flesh is idea. My mind makes things mine by knowing them. Counter, counting and counted are One.”

Midas touched his friends and family and made a social network with whom he could stay in touch with a stream of quick updates. Midas touched actions, and the actions became behaviors and the behaviors became patterns, performance and measurable value. Midas touched the school and all the students were scored, ranked, morally evaluated, and routed to appropriate facilities. Midas touched the appliances in his home to tap their informational juices so they could flow into his world of hard fact.

The world was his at last — all at his transfiguring fingertips.

And behind Midas’s glinting eyes, Plato smiled in his archetypal paradise where the mind is a place of its own, knowing heaven, hell, earth, man, woman, values, categories, instances, criteria, data.

Alchemist’s joke

Philosophy

The next time I hear someone call the U.S. healthcare system a joke, I will enjoy savoring the idea that perhaps this joke is being told at our great expense by a mythical comedian.

See if you think this joke is a funny one…

caduceus-asclepius-dollar

First, few people know that, until recently, the Caduceus of Hermes (what 90+% of Americans would call “the medical symbol”) had nothing to do with medicine. Since ancient times, the Western symbol of medicine has been the Rod of Asclepius — the staff carried by Asclepius, Greek god of medicine — which is a rod with a single serpent entwined around it resembling a U.S. dollar symbol.

The Caduceus only became “the medical symbol” in the early 20th century when it was confounded with the Rod of Asclepius by a U.S. Army Medical Corps officer.

Then note that Hermes is (among other things) the god of commerce. If you are cynical, you might also enjoy contemplating the fact that Hermes is also the god of thieves.

So, our medical symbol is actually the symbol of commerce. Our symbol of commerce is actually a symbol of medicine. We seem able to untangle neither these tangling symbols nor the tangled-up realities they represent, that of dollars and doctors…

Incidentally, Hermes is also a trickster god.

Good one, Hermes.

Ha fucking ha.

 

Five facets of reason

Ethics

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats

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In “The Second Coming” Yeats poses one of the great ethical riddles: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Who are the best and the worst? What defines them as best or worst? How does the question of best and worst connect with questions of belief and will?

What does it looks like when the best rediscovers its convictions?

My own attempts to resolve these questions have more and more revolved around reason. In fact, these attempts have traced a tightening spiraling question: what does it mean to be reasonable?

Below is a first attempt at an answer.

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Reason is not elemental. It is essentially composite and essentially complete.

With reason, the closest approximation to reason is the furthest thing from reason: a facet removed from reason is not reasonable; but reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.

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Reason is fivefold:

Reason is empirical. Reason begins and ends with concrete experience.

Reason is logical. Reason follows the rules of thought, for the sake of civility.

Reason is realist. Reason exists toward a world beyond the realm of knowledge.

Reason is experimental. Reason’s knowledge arises from interaction with reality.

Reason is supple. Reason is ready for surprise, because surprise is the mark of the real.

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An isolated facet of reason is not reasonable.

Empiricism divorced from reason is impressionistic.

Logic divorced from reason is empty.

Realism divorced from reason is helpless.

Experiment divorced from reason is impulsive.

Suppleness divorced from reason is submissive.

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Reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.

Reason without empiricism is delusive.

Reason without logic is arbitrary.

Reason without realism is solipsistic.

Reason without experiment is scholastic.

Reason without suppleness is stagnant.

Inspiration, faith, belief.

Philosophy

Religions are born as freely-given gifts. They mature in gratitude toward the giver. They die as stolen gifts, snatched from the giver’s hand and stolen as a possession: a belief.

*

The giver is a mystery known only by way of receiving from who-knows-where. In the absence of this receiving the giver becomes nonsense.

Once belief is perfected and eternalized — permanently comprehended fact — religion is stillborn-again.

Dis-born, dis-conceived, erased from past and future, annihilated: fundamentalist.

Law of Reason

Design, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.

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“Reason? Why?”

Because it is reasonable.

“But that’s circular.”

It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.

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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.

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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.