Studying etymologies, the world turns elemental — up and down, over and under, toward and away, turning and going, climbing and jumping, throwing and putting and taking, together and apart, before and after, mother and father and child, authority and public, trade and credit.
*
When I was being taught to paint, the teacher limited my palette to titanium white, cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow light and ultramarine blue.
In one corner of the ring, a trainer is telling a boxer that he is completely blowing this fight, that he’s worked and worked and come this far only to piss it away. Where is his will to win? He’d better find it fast. In the opposite corner another trainer is telling a boxer that it’s all ok, that he only needs to remember the three things they’ve worked on together. It’s second nature, now. Stay focused and positive. The bell rings and the two boxers meet again — fists, heads, hearts, bodies and coaching. It is spiritual heterogeneity against a backdrop of purified trauma.
One note on quitting Facebook. There seems to be three basic attitudes on quitting:
What does it mean to be a “douche”? (And I will never stop putting that term in a plastic bag of quote-marks, to prevent accidental skin contact.) I believe a “douche” is someone who enjoys a state of petty arrogance. *
I see no incompatibility between these three attitudes. It’s good to do, it’s hard to do and getting off does indicate some degree of arrogance, not necessarily exceeding the minimums to escape the category of “petty”. *
(* NOTE: the last two paragraphs are examples of “douchey”, as I understand it, and so is this note.)
I’ve deleted all my Google Reader feeds.
For a variety of reasons I’ve quit facebook.
Now is a small town.
Working in my wiki this morning, I found myself tagging this passage from Martin Buber with the theme “tragedy“:
If a man were only guilty toward himself, in order to satisfy the demanding summons that meets him at the height of conscience, he would only need to take this one road from the gate of self-illumination, that of persevering. But a man is always guilty toward other beings as well, toward the world, toward the being that exists over against him. From self-illumination he must, in order to do justice to the summons, take not one road but two roads, of which the second is that of reconciliation. By reconciliation is understood here that action from the height of conscience that corresponds on the plane of the law to the customary act of reparation. In the realm of existential guilt one cannot, of course, ‘make reparation’ in the strict sense — as if the guilt with its consequences could thereby be recalled, as it were. Reconciliation means here, first of all, that I approach the man toward whom I am guilty in the light of my self-illumination (in so far as I can still reach him on earth) acknowledge to his face my existential guilt and help him, in so far as possible, to overcome the consequences of my guilty action. But such a deed can be valid here only as reconciliation if it is done not out of a premeditated resolution, but in the unarbitrary working of the existence I have achieved. And this can happen, naturally, only out of the core of a transformed relationship to the world, a new service to the world with the renewed forces of the renewed man.
This is not the place to speak of the events in the sphere of faith that correspond to the events in the sphere of the high conscience that we have just discussed. For the sincere man of faith, the two spheres are so referred to each other in the practice of his life, and most especially when he has gone through existential guilt, that he cannot entrust himself exclusively to either of them. Both, the human faith not less than the human conscience, can err and err again. And knowing about this their erring, both — conscience not less than faith — must place themselves in the hands of grace. It is not for me to speak in general terms of the inner reality of him who refuses to believe in a transcendent being with whom he can communicate. I have only this to report: that I have met many men in the course of my life who have told me how, acting from the high conscience as men who had become guilty, they experienced themselves as seized by a higher power. These men grew into an existential state to which the name of rebirth is due.
Here is a tragic synthesis that cancels both Pharisaic/fundamentalist dogmatism and antinomianism.
*
As an experiment, I’ve tried reading three quotes from Nietzsche as if they agree with Buber’s view on guilt (setting aside the question of whether Nietzsche’s quotes on Jesus even agree with one another), to see what insights arise:
1.) From Birth of Tragedy:
It is an unimpeachable tradition that in its earliest form Greek tragedy records only the sufferings of Dionysus, and that he was the only actor. But it may be claimed with equal justice that, up to Euripides, Dionysus remains the sole dramatic protagonist and that all the famous characters of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are only masks of that original hero. The fact that a god hides behind all these masks accounts for the much-admired “ideal” character of those celebrated figures. … If we wished to use Plato’s terminology we might speak of the tragic characters of the Greek stage somewhat as follows: the one true Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of characters, in the mask of warrior hero, and enmeshed in the web of individual will. The god ascends the stage in the likeness of a striving and suffering individual. That he can appear at all with this clarity and precision is due to dream interpreter Apollo, who projects before the chorus its Dionysian condition in this analogical figure. Yet in truth that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries.
2) From Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
[Jesus] died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching, had he reached my age. Noble enough was he to recant. But he was not yet mature. Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy. But in the man there is more of the child than in the youth, and less melancholy: he knows better how to die and to live. Free to die and free in death, able to say a holy No when the time for Yes has passed; thus he knows how to die and to live.
3) From The Antichrist:
Until [the crucifixion] this warlike, this No-saying, No-doing trait had been lacking in [Jesus’s] image; even more, he had been its opposite. Evidently the small community did not understand the main point, the exemplary character of this kind of death, the freedom, the superiority over any feeling of ressentiment: — a token of how little they understood him altogether! After all, Jesus could not intend anything with his death except to give publicly the strongest exhibition, the proof of his doctrine … But his disciples were far from forgiving this death — which would have been evangelic in the highest sense; or even from offering themselves for a like death in gentle and lovely repose of the heart … Precisely the most unevangelical feeling, revenge, came to the fore again.
The name of the final chapter of Leviathan and the Air-Pump is “The Polity of Science: Conclusions”. My own understanding of polity has been most influenced by On Justification. I would say both of these works are part of the developing Actor-Network canon — that is, they’re both mentioned in Reassembling the Social, which I’ve taken to be pretty much the Bible of ANT. So I am a little surprised that there appears nobody has yet performed a Boltanski-style analysis of the “Scientific World”. And since this is (with certain ontological adjustments) my own world, it seems that this might be a valuable thing to do. I’m putting this on my list of things I’d like to like to do. Maybe I’ll even make myself do it, or at least do it for the social science polity. Or the UCD polity…
*
My interest in On Justification is this: it is clear that at the root of authentic brand is the lifeworld family of concepts (culture, form of life, language game, polity, worldview, perspective, vision, etc.). Authenticity of brand is a function of its faith to the logic of its worldview and the traditions of its lifeworld. I’ve spent a decent amount of effort looking for frameworks that might help define/describe/locate/orient a lifeworld for the purposes of branding. I’d like to see a kind of branding that synthesizes Michael Porter’s activity system approach to strategy, actor-network theory’s approach to people research, and a Nietzschean concrete pluralist ethic/ethos. I want a genodynamic brand strategy to replace the phenodynamic superficiality of conventional brand identity.
Where a person chooses to work, and how that person relates with others in the workplace shows that person’s deepest political preferences (as opposed to superficial party loyalties).
*
The pragmatic meaning of “respect” litmus test: Some people believe respect means to treat all people as equals (or at least political equals), while others think it means to acknowledge organizational rank (which means accepting inequality), while yet others have personal criteria for earning respect through displays of this or that virtue (industriousness, honesty, intelligence, ingenuity).
It is easy to see how perceptions of “disrespect” can occur across conflicting definition of respect… One person attempts to treat another person as an equal, and this is perceived by the other as insubordinate presumption of an inferior…
Workplace clashes of this kind is the true site of ideological difference (between what Boltanski and Thévenot called “polities“). The appeals that are heard or not heard, the decisions that are praised or condemned, the preferences that are honored or ignored in the daily world of work is the very political substance of a person’s life. “Office politics” is not a metaphor — it is where politics touch down, are lived out as the reality of choice or compulsion.
Compared to the reality of work politics, national politics as reported by Fox News or MSNBC is abstraction. Newscasting might as well be sportscasting. Parties are rival teams playing in distant coliseums. We may have bets placed on one team or another, but mostly it’s just symbol play.
*
Every company is a polis. Beneath the surface of missions and core value (and other such internal-communicationy bullshit), every business has a set of values or rival sets of values, which have been operationalized as work practices, and which are regulated through local political norms. These operationalized values determine the character of the businesses offerings and its self-presentation in the market.
I’d rather do ordinary things with extraordinary people than extraordinary things with ordinary people.
Science : engineering :: philosophy : design
*
Like science, philosophy seeks truth, which means finding intelligible patterns in reality as we live it.
Like religion, philosophy is guided by intellectual aesthetics. If we are truthful with ourselves, we do not love truth on the strength of its truthfulness. We have a taste for certain problems, questions, resolutions and facts, rooted in nature, nurture and circumstance. When we see truth in a way congenial to our tastes, life is more alive to us.
Not that everyone has taste. Some have bad taste, and even more have weak taste. Philistinism extends to taste in truth.
*
Some useful objects in our lives do not resonate with our tastes, and nobody expects them to. Such objects are hidden from our experience or we simply pay no attention to them. These objects can be engineered without any reference to human sensibilities, according to the facts uncovered by science.
Other useful objects in our lives do matter to us, and we want them to resonate with our tastes. These objects are designed, as well as engineered. The truth that guides the design of the objects must take account of science but will also include and understanding of the user’s sensibilities. Such an understanding is a philosophical truth: a fusion of truth and taste.
In my view (especially after reading Leviathan and the Air-Pump) scientific truths are engineered, where philosophical truths are actually designed.
Here’s the question that interests me right now: how would one do user-centered design of a philosophy? In my opinion, this is what brand strategy wants to become: a philosophy of an organization which enables it to function according to a particular intellectual and artistic taste. When the functional and aesthetic are treated as two separate realms, the aesthetic takes on a Sunday-religious character — an occasional emotional/moral edification added to workaday functional genericism. But when the aesthetic and functional form an organic whole that permeates everything an organization does.
But standing behind (or above or beneath) a designed philosophy is another philosophy which holds to an ontology and epistemology that permits a philosophy to be designed by giving reality and truth latitude for choice. And this meta-philosophy is Pragmatism.
*
I need to study Kuhn’s work on theory choice in science. Everyone who has looked into the matter closely has found that there is an element of taste even in scientific practice. Here’s the theory choice considerations Kuhn identified:
Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation.
Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories.
Broad Scope – a theory’s consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain.
Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam’s Razor.
Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena.
An outline of my meager understanding of the history of science:
I’m thinking of reading Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe in order to get a basic, probably outdated, plot-line to work with.
Why do I care? I want to paint business as being stuck back at step 4, and make a case for progressing to step 6. And yes, I’m whigging.
The excessive specificity of scholarly monographs can seem ridiculous from the outside, but the most explosive insights are located between the banal minutiae and irrelevant anomalies of human life.
splitting the atom : physics :: splitting hairs : humanities
I’ve never believed that Nietzsche’s will to power was meant to be something that belongs solely to individuals, nor that it takes the form of domination. Groups of people have a will to power, as much as the individuals who constitute groups, as do the psychic subdivisions within an individual psyche. And this will to power can manifest and resolve itself in myriad ways, sometimes through coercion, but often through alliance.
Nietzsche was a reductionist — reducing all human and even natural actions to the universal animating force of the will to power — but this force was understood to undergo rich transformations and sublimations in its journey from inorganic to organic to social life, and it is crucial to note both that Nietzsche did stratify and rank these transformations, noted their changes in character as they elevated in rank.
Here is Nietzsche’s advice to readers who want to interpret the fuller meaning of his work:
“It is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…”
This is actually good advice for any hermeneutic activity, whether it is understanding a written work, a person, a situation… If you misunderstand your job as gathering lots and lots of facts as hastily as possible to assemble into some sort of representation of the sum of the writer/person/situation’s scattered opinions, you’ll end up with something quite different than if you take the time to reflect, form hypotheses, test them, and interact understandingly with whatever it is you are interpreting.
In its infancy a models helps us conceptualize complexity, and helps us orient ourselves within a problem that would otherwise be experienced as bewildering chaos.
Later as the model matures it help us manage complexity, and helps us keep large numbers of details organized so we can capture, present and recall them.
Research that develops models where no adequate models exist has relies more on philosophical thought. Research that uses and populates existing models relies more on observational skills.
Natural science : technology :: social science : design
Human nature is artificiality.
Humankind has co-evolved with the civilizations we have built and inhabited. Under the pressures of these artificial habitats (which include not only what we live in, but live with and use), we have biologically evolved and become capable of rebuilding our civilizations in new ways — within which, and with which, we further biologically evolve.
Human beings as we are now have never existed apart from civilization, and would be incomplete alone and in the wilderness. The belief that we’d be better off without civilization is artifice, but artifice discordant with our true artificial natures.
*
Humankind and civilization are the twin children produced by humankind and civilization, who will parent the next twins. We belong to an interminable double-helix chain of bio-artifice incest stretching behind us and before us. We blind ourselves with Origin stories of perfection lost and regained.
*
Don’t even try to make arguments based on what is and is not natural. In human existence, nothing is natural. The best we have is second-nature: some things seem or feel natural, and other things can come to seem or feel natural, and these second-natures vary from individual to individual. If you take this fact (the pluralistic fact) seriously enough to make attempts to learn the specifics of varying experiences of naturalness, which differs from psychic economy to psychic economy, you’ll approach truth instead of shrinking from it.
*
Conservatives who hate the idea of evolution should take extreme care to avoid understanding the concept of co-evolution. Evolution is training wheels for the shock of its logical progression to co-evolution.
We’d better protect the sanctimony of our individual marriage customs, because collectively we are a polygamous, incestuous, bestial, technophilic monsters, marrying and mating with animals, household appliances and anything that moves (or fails to move fast enough to escape our embrace) for dozens of millennia.
We’ve done all sorts of crazy things to ourselves as a species, and who’s to judge what ought to or ought not to have happened? Actually, we will, and in the process we will do yet more crazy things to ourselves.
*
My new definition of design: humans artificing and doing crazy things to ourselves.