Epistemological pluralism situates human beings in a world that can be known only partially. And one’s partiality determines one’s focus of attention and one’s experimental activities. The truth one finds in the world and integrates as a body of knowledge depends entirely on how one lives out life. Different ways of living necessarily yield different and often conflicting bodies of partial truth. The more faithfully, comprehensively and rigorously we pursue, observe and order truth, the more it will diverge.

Ontological pluralism adheres to a taoist metaphysic, though not necessarily a taoist ethic (te).

Ethical pluralism ethic asserts that the testimony of different conceptions of truth ought to be treated as valid.

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My own ethical pluralism aims at a world where I and those around me share a world we can comprehend, act within, and care about.

That last point: creating a world we can care about together is the cornerstone of this ethic.

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The world can become many things to us.

We can make it explicable or mysterious.

We can make it an epic project, or an endless game.

We can make it something  we love, or we can make it into something we endure.

We make what the world becomes, and we make who humanity becomes.

Humanity is always the child and parent of humanity.

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Human nature is artificiality.

The only question that matters is the quality of our art.

To Michel Serres and to all
of those who are crossing
his Northwest Passage

– Inscription from Latour’s Pasteurization of France

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What is Serres’ Northwest Passage? From Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour:

This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage … with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable … It’s more fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had.

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The dualism of material and mind which has been productive for centuries has led the Western world into paralysis. We can’t resolve it by simply denying the fact of the duality, because even if we negate the What of the thought, the How of the thought survives it in our way of doing our thinking. We have to find new mind-movements — dances — that permit new lifeworlds (or networks of lifeworlds) to arise.

But we cannot understand these new movements by our old movements. We have to stop for a moment, then start in a different direction, with different movements. Groping, stumbling, stammering, in a shifty, shadowy terrain, guided by our fingertips and the star of perplexity. That’s how it’s done.

The perceptible forms of art are the last step of a much longer process of intellectual-spiritual transformation and discovery. This process often feels like pure shit, and sensible people avoid it. But an artist who aspires to create something unprecedented cannot avoid this ordeal, because this is the only way to discover a new way to perceive and live out life.

This — and nothing else — is what genius is: the discovery and development of new forms of life that naturally and urgently externalize themselves through creation of forms.

Whoever it was who re-assignment of the word “genius” to high IQ did our culture a disservice. Genius cannot be measured, only detected, because it is always hits us from an angle we don’t know how to expect. What IQ measures is not genius, but ingenuity, our ability to manipulate systems of objects, which includes not only physical objects but intellectual ones as well, such as concepts, techniques and stylistic elements.

For the last 30-some years art has tried to get by on mere ingenuity. Ambitious artists play archeologist and anthropologist, digging and rummaging through other times and places for exotic influences to excite their ingenuity.

This method reliably yields recombinations of stylistic elements useful on making things that might be perceived as new or at least fresh by an audience bored with the artistic products they’ve been consuming — but this approach cannot make the audience itself feel new and see life as new.

And even this modest accomplishment has an expiration date. Sooner or later, the limited spiritual resources of history will be depleted, and a sense that everything that could be has been sets in and we suffer an Ecclesiastes effect.

Until artists learn to find the world beyond art interesting, the world of art will grow less and less interesting. Until artists find meaning in engaging in the whole of life and struggling with it, their art will engage nobody, because it will present no challenge worth a struggle.

I’m starting to disbelieve in the common belief that Levinas is the heir of Buber, who has somehow made Buber obsolete. I don’t believe they share moral vision. Maybe the most important evidence is the experience of reading them, which could not be less similar despite their common material. Buber is an electrifying read, where Levinas is crushingly heavy and darkening.

Part of me enjoys thinking of Levinas as unbearably good (as a representative of Paul’s notion of the impossibility of Law), but another part of me thinks he is unbearable because his moral vision is ruinous.

Levinas might be the foremost advocate of the process by which the best are stripped of all conviction leaving the worst unsupervised and prone to unscrupulous conviction violent intensification.

The Other is indispensable to the central self, but that does not give it precedent. This might shed some light on the ancient insistence in Chinese thought that heaven must outrank earth (to put it as acceptably as possible).

When the center no longer holds, the best lack all conviction, because only what holds to the center is worthy of conviction.

Continue reading Thoughts on Yeats →

Ideologues make Trojan horses of factual account packed with ethical valuations.

Once you learn to open the horse and force out the passengers, you can accept gifts from your enemies.

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While all religions attempt accounts for the same metaphysical sphere of reality — at least to the degree of acknowledging its existence — they assume sharply divergent ethical stances. Religions seem alike only when lumped together and opposed to strictly scientific accounts of reality, similarly to how all classical music sounds the same to ears accustomed to popular music.

Perhaps there’s another stratum of truth above ethical principles where variety converges again into unity. Even if this is the case, it does not serve the purposes of the perennialist peacenik crowd who plaster their vehicles with “coexist” bumper stickers, reject the hard-edged formalities of religion in favor of a nebulous spirituality of passive vegged-out bliss.

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Denial of difference does not accomplish peace.

Treating peace as something that should already be, and would already be if it weren’t for the viciousness of our neighbor, is violent and will incite violence.

If your neighbor thinks a point of disagreement is important and you disagree, you have not settled the disagreement, except in your own mind. You have deepened and intensified the disagreement through disrespect. Respect requires belief in what stands beyond your own mind and its current horizons.

Respectfully acknowledging differences, taking them seriously, working with them, learning from them, changing in response to what we learn — that is how peace is accomplished.

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Peaceful unity is accomplished through working together toward a permanently transcendent universal.

Because people who love to think rarely interact with others who love to think, many thinkers fail to cultivate their social-thinking graces. If the thinker is authentic, he behaves inconsiderately. If the thinker actively attempts considerateness he easily falls into thought-obstructing social conventions such as meeting etiquette, or  jokey banter, or polite pleasantries.

Because of this, thinkers often continue to think in isolation, even if they know other thinkers.

The transcendent and the transcendental are alike only in that they are not phenomenal. To confuse them is a big childish mistake.

There are two reasons I care about business:

1. My circumstances make engagement in business non-optional, and I have to care in order to engage.
2. Business is the sole remaining opportunity in our society for sustained collaborative thought.

I have to find opportunities for sustained collaborative thought in order to engage and function and preserve my circumstances. I’m not one of those lucky people who can function just because they have to, or who can care because caring is expedient.

I care by figuring out how to care.

When business does not provide opportunities for sustained collaborative thought, my life becomes precarious.

We like sporadic deep chatting that goes nowhere because going nowhere it takes us nowhere.

We are encouraged to read admired thinkers and to join in admiring them.

I have mixed feelings about Bruce Nussbaum’s “Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?”

On one hand, I agree with every word of it. For instance, this statement is dead-on: “Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.”

Design thinking more or less had to bow to the business management mindset and its demand that all practices be limited to techniques arranged in sequential processes. When such practices yield success or failure the outcome is attributed to the efficacy of the techniques and processes.

Nussbaum continues: “There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.”

What Nussbaum is pointing out is a bit taboo: even when the design thinking process seems to work, it is not the process that produces the innovations. Something else smuggled in with process does the real work when innovation happens. And if that active ingredient is missing, the process produces only trivial, incremental advances.

Nussbaum then gives a name to this active ingredient: Creative Intelligence or CQ.

Nussbaum presents CQ as a faculty which can be cultivated. “Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space–our lives today.”

The faculty is bound up with the ability to see problems from multiple angles, and to discover new practical responses: “At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned.”

I agree with Nussbaum that some of the abilities he associates with CQ are rooted in capabilities of individuals, some of which is based in talent and much of which can be cultivated. Some individuals have a tendency to reflect on problems and look at them from multiple angles, find it natural to experiment with different approaches to solving them. These are the people who get reputations for being “creative thinkers” in an organization.

However, I still think much remains to be done at the level of management to support CQ beyond what has been covered by Marty Neumeier, Tim Brown and especially Roger Martin in their books on design thinking.

Especially neglected is the work around problem reframing, and also the ways organizations accidentally discourage it — and not only for the usual reasons (unpredictability, inefficiency, etc.).

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Here I will transition to a post I am considering putting on the LinkedIn Design Thinking group:

A week ago Steve Sato asked an interesting question: “If Systems Thinking optimizes for the whole and part, then what does Design Thinking optimize for?”

What makes the question interesting is that it cannot be answered as asked. Design thinking does not optimize for any particular thing, but for many things at once in response to what the problem requires.

Design thinking re-opens the question: “what are we optimizing for?” and includes all stakeholders in reformulating the question and answering it.

This open-endedness is what makes DT so unnerving to so many professionals. It creates enormous anxiety to suspend one’s own ideals and to pursue a new one that is inconceivable right up to the second it is conceived.

We don’t mind not having the answer to a question. We do mind — intensely — not having a question to work at answering. (For Thomas Kuhn fans, this is the difference between normal and extraordinary science.) Another name for this state is perplexity.

Anxiety and perplexity is the cause of tension in creative teams. Far too often it is misdiagnosed as unhealthy conflict. When the perplexity is foreclosed (usually in the name of time-urgency or team harmony), it destroys a team’s ability to find deeply creative solutions to problems.

Back in April, Bruce Nussbaum wrote a provocative little article publicly declaring the death of design thinking, and isolating the true active ingredient of design thinking: CQ, or creative intelligence, “the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions.” Exactly.

CQ is bound up with the ability to let go of an older conception of a problem, to immerse in perplexity and, never looking back, to navigate to the other side of it to an unprecedented solution.

I think Nussbaum overstated his case to stimulate conversation, so I won’t take the bait and try to argue that design thinking is still relevant and vital. Instead, I want to try to outdo Nussbaum by unmasking CQ for what it really is. Quoting Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ “If you want design thinking to produce deep innovations, try putting a philosopher on your team.

New ideas do not bother us.

What bothers us is having to unthink old ideas in order to understand a new one.

When we unthink an idea we make space for a new, as yet uncomprehended idea.

In the gap between the unthought old idea and the not-yet-thought new idea is sheer anxiety.

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When a group tries to work out a problem and no resolution is in sight, this generates horrible anxiety.

It is tempting to force a resolution — either an old one, or a new one favored by one party.

Forced resolutions in the face of anxiety is what makes groups unimaginative and sterile.

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If a group learns to tolerate anxiety and to navigate chaos, its creativity can surpass that of an individual.

Group-think will eventually lose its pejorative meaning.

First, however, we will have to rethink the meaning of anxiety and creativity.

That means we will have to unthink our ideas around creativity and appropriate work conduct.

Humankind can no longer afford to accept naive realism in its leaders.

Naive realism was acceptable back when collective action was confined to the scale of tribes. Each tribe had its god, its reality, its way, and to it, that was the way.

Contemporary societies are too big, diverse and powerful to be left in the hands of people who are blind to the fact of pluralism.

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All the qualities we admire in a leader — resoluteness, firmness, constancy, perseverance — can result from either insightful adjustment into the human condition or from naive realism. In other words, the first and the last can closely resemble one another. And until very recently, the last has been counted first. The inversion of this order is already underway.

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Naive realism exists in both idealist and materialist forms. (“Reality is essentially spiritual.” “Reality is essentially physical.”)

Many people are “converted”, “reborn” or “enlightened” from one to the other, but nothing of much importance is accomplished in such shifts from “apparent reality” to “real reality”. And shifts from realism (in general) to skepticism toward all realism is also common and trivial.

However, as common and trivial as these transfiguration experiences are, when they occur to an individual they always and inevitably feel intensely important, unprecedented and final.

Why? Because until they occur, they are, by definition, inconceivable. Prior to the conversion, all talk about conversion is dragged into the horizons of naive realism, explained in terms acceptable to that naive realist worldview (conversion is an opinion change, or a superior explanation, or some sort of magic or supernatural shift in status) and thus stripped of its essential meaning. One’s first exposure to transfiguration is necessarily surprising, disorienting and temporarily intellectually isolating. It’s always the real deal, as opposed to what everyone else had been talking about…

Arresting the process at this point means staying merely “born again” — to remain permanently in the infancy of one’s rebirth. One must mature into this new reality and become a spiritual adult.

The failure to mature past the mere fact of rebith is “spiritual danger”.

To believe one is the first — to fail to recognize the universality of the experience — is to succumb to spiritual retardation.