Category Archives: Biography

Generative thoughts

Biography, Hermeneutics

My favorite books are nearly impossible to read, because they cause me to have so many of my own thoughts.

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An insight is a generative thought: an idea that produces ideas.

An insight is impossible to speak about directly. It can only be observed, but not empirically in the usual sense. What is observed is intellectual behavior. This kind of observation takes the form of following a thought. It is an intellectual participatory observation.

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A very strange reading experience:

  1. At the beginning of the book the author sets a painful and apparently irresolvable problem.
  2. Then the author shifts his attention to a second, different problem. He approaches it from several angles, and resolves it several ways. Each angle sets off an explosion of original thoughts. It is hard for the reader to get through the book. (And some of the explosions reverberate into the reader’s own past and future, and change the meanings of things in unexpectable ways.)
  3. Then toward the end of the book the author shifts back to the original problem. The reader is shocked to find himself reading the very thoughts he’d conceived earlier, sometimes worded almost identically. It is as if the author made the reader think his thoughts (and in profound cases, even feel his feelings).

What is going on here? My explanation:

The author has presented a problem the reader does not know how to think out. His mind lacks the movements necessary to resolve it, and it leaves him with a sort of knot in the mind.

Through the explorations of the second problem, his mind learns to produce the necessary movements. (“The dance.”) Once the reader has acquired the means to resolve the first problem himself, the resolvability somehow causes the mind to recall and solve the problems almost effortlessly. This causes the eruption of thoughts.

Then the author “winks” and indicates what has happened by showing his own resolutions by the same method. This phenomenon is itself theoretically, practically and ethically problematic, and it has been the obsession of many fine minds.

The company is the polis

Biography

I’ve finished re-reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I didn’t want to finish it. I’d love to keep reading and stay this state of mind forever.

Here’s the last paragraph of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:

Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach, especially his claim that “man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice,” is a fitting conclusion to this study. We can no longer share Marx’s theoretical certainty or revolutionary self-confidence. There is no guarantee, there is no necessity, no “logic of history” that must inevitably lead to dialogical communities that embrace all of humanity and in which reciprocal judgment, practical discourse, and rational persuasion flourish. If anything, we have or should have learned how much the contemporary world conspires against it and undermines it. And yet it is still a telos, a telos deeply rooted in our human project. As Marx cautions us, it is not sufficient to try to come up with some new variations of arguments that will show, once and for all, what is wrong with objectivism and relativism, or even to open up a way of thinking that can move us beyond objectivism and relativism; such a movement gains “reality and power” only if we dedicate ourselves to the practical task of furthering the type of solidarity, participation, and mutual recognition that is founded in dialogical communities.

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Re-reading this book has helped me remember why I left my little isolated garden paradise of a thoroughly undemanding non-profit life, where I had the freedom to work on philosophical problems with minimal interference, to return to the commercial world. I came back for genuine dialogical, synetic collaboration. There is nothing in the world more fascinating, precious and rare than dialogue, authentic community, real intersubjective absorption in shared problems.

One of my nutty beliefs: In our time the company is the polis. The commercial world is our ecumene. So then: What governs the life of a company? What is its power structure? What are its principles? Is a company necessarily a pure plutocracy? Is democracy possible? If so, what are the tradoffs? What guides a company’s business practice? Pure business techne? Phronsis? Synesis? How does a power structure preserve itself in its practices and its principles?

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Business is a huge practical-philosophical laboratory. Every project is a political petri dish.

The “analysis paralysis” argument as filibuster

Biography

The people I know who most frequently cry, “Analysis paralysis!” and demand that everyone take immediate action without further discussion generally claim to do so for the sake of expedience. There is no time for this, they argue. The group must stop talking and start doing, and make progress toward its meeting its goal.

Try pushing back on moving forward with their plan, however, and their behavior begins to suggest that perhaps something besides expedience might be motivating them. 1) They are often suspiciously willing to argue for hours that wasting time on further discussion is ridiculous given the urgency of the situation; and 2) they are suspiciously unwilling, for the sake of expedience, to yield to the course of action advised by their opponent. It is the other guy who needs to be sensible, to be a team player, etc.

Consider this possibility: Perhaps “analysis paralysis” only appears to be caused by analysis and deliberation, but that the root cause is resistance to deliberation by those who think they can use means other than deliberation to get their way. They hold a project hostage with their stubborn uncooperation (or other bullying behaviors) until the group pays the ransom: doing things their way.

Essentially, the type of bickering, non-communicative talk used to argue against deliberation is a sneaky form of filibustering.

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All too often, other people on a project (people who dislike conflict and really do want to get things moving) are eager to whatever it takes to end the conflict. What’s the quickest route to end the stalemate? Putting an end to further deliberation, of course! The filibusterer keeps arguing to end it, and the other guy keeps going, anyway. The team takes the path of least resistance. They pressure the one arguing for the deliberation to capitulate.

After all, has deliberation gotten us anywhere?

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A filibustering argument against deliberation  creates an illusion of symmetry: two sides are talking but neither side can come to an agreement. It works to discredit deliberation by aping the forms of deliberation while undermining it, and in so doing demonstrates the futility of talk.

Further, the content of the filibuster’s speech is expedience, team-play, progress, being realistic, reasonable, efficient. Who can argue with that? The other party is positioned as arguing against all these good things. He is obstructing progress, insisting on being indulged, not caring that the team is facing a deadline, wasting time on more talk. The other guy doesn’t agree with him, but he just won’t give up.

Talk isn’t working, but he keeps on talking, anyway.

See? Sneaky!

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Subtle distinctions with important consequences:

Not all talk is dialogue. Not all argument is deliberation. Dialogue requires a sincere attempt by all parties to understand one another. Deliberation is the genuine attempt to reach consensus on a course of action.

Dialogue and deliberation are precisely what an “analysis paralysis” filibuster obstructs. It argues against the need to reach common understanding, and passes this off as simple disagreement. It argues against considering rival courses of action and presents the failure to agree on this fact as a failure of deliberation itself.

Dialogue and deliberation require a good-faith effort by all parties involved. They fail from lack of desire for them to succeed. This fact is easily exploited when a group values harmony and efficiency so much that it will purchase it at any cost, even reason, collaboration, empathy, respect and all those other pretty “core values” words that people love to talk about, but are so ready to betray to “practicality” (* See note below).

To allow an “analysis paralysis” filibuster to kill deliberation is to cooperate with it and succumb to it, and to reward coercive tactics that undermine authentic collaboration.

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Think about the people you have known in the past who have played the “analysis paralysis” card. They usually have one of several of the following characteristics:

  1. They are in a position of power and know they can get away with coercion.
  2. They simply don’t enjoy analysis and look for excuses to avoid it.
  3. They are intellectually disinclined to understand perspectives other than their own. Often this is because…
  4. They tend to think there is a right answer, and if someone cannot prove them that the answer they have found is wrong, it proves that their solution must be the right one.
  5. They fail to see that a misunderstanding by definition looks exactly like an understanding to one who misunderstands.
  6. They have very strong wills, and see stubbornness as a virtue.

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Any group that considers itself founded on principles of respect and collaboration can quickly cure its “analysis paralysis” by doing the following:

  1. Agree that all attempts to circumvent deliberation will not be tolerated by the group and will automatically fail.
  2. Make it clear that the most expedient course of action is to use open, reasonable dialogue to come to a solution acceptable to everyone, which might not be one of the original proposals, or even a compromise, but a creative synthesis superior to all the initial proposals.
  3. Establish that decisions are to be made by weighing the merits and weaknesses of each proposal (as opposed to adopting the first proposal as the default, and requiring the first proposal to be shown faulty before rival proposals are considered.)
  4. In disagreements, require each disagreeing party to represent the view of the other to the satisfaction of the other, to establish that common understanding has been achieved.

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Analysis paralysis will not be cured by indulging those who paralyze analysis through filibustering. The only cure is a political one. The group must say together: “We do not have time to argue for hours with you that we do not have time to argue. Converse respectfully or forfeit the argument.”

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* NOTE: Practicality, of course, is a euphemism for “expedience” which is in truth the only “core value” most people hold, because expedience is the principle of having no principles at all. I also keep hearing people calling expedience “pragmatism”, which galls the hell out of me. Take my word for it, or read up on it yourself: genuine pragmatism takes far more balls and brains than most people have.

Empathy + Alignment + Realism

Biography, Brand, Design, Philosophy, Synesis

I wrote a manifesto for my company and put it on our intranet:

An attempt at a distillation of [this company]’s culture, in words we frequently use when describing and differentiating our approach:

  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.
  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.
  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

These three principles govern how we relate to one another on our teams, and how we relate to our clients.

Our goal is to help our clients actualize empathy + alignment + realism in their own organizations, both externally with their customers and internally with one other.

We believe that empathy + alignment + realism are core principles of ethical effectiveness. By articulating, championing and exemplifying these principles, and by helping our clients and partners put them into practice [this company] makes a positive contribution to the world of commerce and to the world as a whole.

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These principles do not exhaust the range of values active in [this company]’s culture. However, if you look closely at those values it gradually becomes clear that they all grow out from the root principles of empathy + alignment + realism.

A helpful analogy: the root principles are the DNA of our culture; the core values are the genetic traits of our company – which is the starting point for our brand.

Our brand is developed continually through collective self-cultivation (iterative clarification, accentuation and application of our principles and core values, alongside the company traditions that support them) and collective self-presentation (our formal brand guidelines – visual identity, voice and tone, interaction style). The latter can be seen as a sort of grooming: We present who we authentically are in the best possible light.

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[This company] will strengthen its brand externally, partly through explicit branding efforts, but more because [this company] has a powerful internal and semi-internal (our clients and partners) brand community.

This is something we also can perfect internally and then package for our clients: internal brand community as the key to authentic and powerful external branding. It is grounded in a simple idea: the most effective way to be perceived as something is to actually be it.

Branding can be seen as the practice of compellingly and authentically externalizing a company’s culture. Internal branding is the conscious aligning of a company’s culture to its external brand, so the two mutually reinforce.

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  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.

Empathy is not figuring other people out; it is not discovering what they are after, or knowing how to manipulated them to get them to do what you want them to do.

Empathy is, in Aristotle’s language, synesis, or understanding. Synesis is like sympathy, but involves the entirely of another’s subjectivity – cognition, language, moral priorities, hopes, fears, symbol-system, his aesthetic sense, his social environment… it is not a theoretical, externalized theory, but a holistic vision of life in which an understander is involved. Synesis turns parallel talking into dialogue.

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.

Alignment is not stalemate or compromise. It is not accomplished in a battle where each party pushes as hard as it can for its own interests until it has won as much ground as it can. Alignment can only happen when all parties have a stake in the other parties’ well-being. All parties must desire and aim for a solution that satisfies everyone involved. This aim has an abstracting effect: what concern is embedded in each conflicting solution? What solutions are possible that satisfy all concerns and dissolve the conflict?

Alignment presupposes pluralism: that there can be multiple satisfactory solutions. It is not a question of which solution is viable, and which solutions are not viable. It is a question of which viable solution can be agreed upon by all parties in the deliberation.

Alignment is, in Aristotle’s language, phronesis, or prudence. Phronesis is what turns churning debate into productive deliberation.

For alignment to work, all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others, but in the end, the focus of the deliberation must be, not on the parties in the deliberation, but on their shared problem.

  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

Realism is not functionalism. Realism is also not being resigned to “the way things are”.

Also, realism is not factoring oneself out of the picure in a misconceived attempt at objectivity.

Realism means being scientific. It means cheerfully putting your ideas to the test, and letting them go if the test shows the ideas are not viable. It means cheerfully adopting another’s ideas as one’s own if they are shown to be better.

Realism means that you stay subjectively, personally involved in the problems you are deliberating, but in such a way that you are open to change.

For realism to work (and to not devolve into the poverty of functionalism or complacent pseudo-conservatism), all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others and enlarge their understanding of the problem at hand to include the concerns of the others. The group must collectively turn toward the problem itself, and work toward solutions that satisfy the concerns of everyone involved. Finally, the solutions must be subjected to test, whether that test is a formal experiment or some other criterion or standard for success.

Brand Cramps

Biography, Brand

When people start listing great brands you can count on Apple being at the top, then Nike, then Starbucks, then usually Sony, etc.

To make my list more interesting and less credible I think I am going to start dropping the Cramps into the second or third spot.

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The Cramps were my first and purest brand experience. They were my favorite band during my transitional years between high school and college, the years when I left my parents’ home and was airdropped into alien college territory. I loved the Cramps, but I only sort of liked their music. There was something inexplicably compelling about them but it had little to do with the sound. I didn’t know what to do with this discrepancy, so I just left it alone and assumed I actually did love their music, despite the fact that I listened to it only occasionally, primarily when I wanted to be existentially Cramped.

It took me years to realize: In the space of that discrepancy is the life of brand.

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Looking back, the Cramps’ way – a rigorous logic founded on a strictly limited set of aesthetic premises (*see note 1 below) to create a world-view as consistent and coherent as it was irrational – was ideally suited to my own situation as an alienated, disoriented kid in chaos.

The Cramps’ modus operandi: Don’t look for order out there, because the world is mostly ridiculous and what isn’t ridiculous is boring and not worth the pain. Found your life on your own ridiculous enthusiasms. Then, with the diligence and discipline of a medieval scholar, build out a world of pure, crystalline nonsense. Finally, and most importantly, do not talk about it. Do not explain the punchline. Simply do it, and let the actions and the artifacts speak for themselves. Enjoy it when people get it, and enjoy it even more when they don’t.  This stance was pure first-wave New York punk (*see note 2 below).

The Cramps provided me a starting point for creating order founded on meaning, and gave me relief from disorientation, boredom and anxiety. This is what good brands do in our nutty post-modern world, where meaningful orientation and coherence are far from given.

Human beings cannot live without meaning. Even a tiny grain of authentic meaning (even something as insignificant as really digging your iPod) properly understood can eventually grow out into a robust life-sustaining vision. Brand is not enough, but it is a start. Learning what brand essentially is, can help us recover many other forgotten human truths.

R.I.P. Lux Interior.

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Some examples of the vision:

* NOTE 1: The premises of the Cramps: 1. music fandom – rockabilly, surf and 60s garage punk – recorded by crazed geniuses stranded in obscurity, limited releases, collected by obsessed cultural packrats; 2. cheap horror flicks; 3. severe mental disturbances (psychosis, lycanthropy, adolescence, major inbreeding, etc.); 4. sexual perversion, conceived as something cartoonish and as innocent as Elvis.

* NOTE 2: Anyone who thinks punk rock was primarily a musical form or just a style has missed the point. Punk rock was a vision for a dignified existence in a undignified world.

Not a textbook

Biography, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism

I cannot believe how much I am enjoying rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I have a couple of exciting new leads: Paul Feyerabend – who is certain to be a terrible influence on me (consider the title of his main work: Against Method) – and Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist. The last time I read this book was in early 2006, and the two leads of that reading were Kuhn (paradigms) and Gadamer (fusion of horizons), so anyone who has spoken with me at any length at all will immediately understand the impact Bernstein has already had on me.

(I’m gradually acquiring the entire bibliography of  Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, and my library is becoming even more home-like.)

What’s fascinating about Bernstein is that his books appear at first glance to be closer to textbooks than original philosophical works, but that is not the case. He does original philosophy in the medium of comparative discussions of other people’s thinking. His philosophy is deeply social, but this does not mean he places the locus of his philosophy outside of his own understandings or his own experience. (It is understandable why someone unfamiliar with his mode of thought might see it that way. This is actually one of the issues he addresses in his writing.)

I buy lots and lots of books for my friends. I’ve given more copies of this book away than any other book.

The books of my life

Biography

I had another amazing morning reading Bernstein. As I’ve said before, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism triggered a major turning point in my intellectual life. Rereading it, I’ll also say it is one of the clearest, most insightful and most useful books I’ve ever read. I meant to post some excerpts from what I read this morning, but now I want to make a list of the books that have changed me.

1987: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The idea paraphrased by my ethics professor, “A good man has learned to love what is good,” has dominated my ethical thought since I heard it. A taste for virtue is cultivated through habit.

1993: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
This was my first glimpse of the purpose of education, beyond mere training and credentialing. I read this right after I graduated from college, and I’ve ached over wasting my time in school ever since. I don’t think this is an especially great book, but it did inspire me to educate myself and it dislodged me from my shallow “liberalism”.

1995: Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones
This was my first genuinely literary experience – a story meant less as narrative than an existential demonstration – and my first exposure to someone I recognized as experiencing the world in a distinctive way that was similar to my own experience. I didn’t fully realize how unusual my experience of the world was until I found myself feeling at home in Borges’s stories and essays.

1995: Carl Jung’s Psychological Types
Learning that I was a particular type, and not completely unique, that other recognizable types existed (very differently from me) around me, and that I could relate to them better by understanding their typological perspective were earth-shattering discoveries. I was obsessed with personality type for a decade.

1996: Houston Smith’s The World’s Religions
Smith’s chapter on Buddhism persuaded me to study and practice Theravada Buddhism. This was the point when I became serious about spiritual knowledge. The experience of meditation showed me a number of my fundamental truths: the composite nature of being, the ephemerality of consciousness, the autonomy of thoughts. This was also the first time the nations of the world made sense to me and had cultural reality: nations were characterized by the religions that formed their character.

2001: Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language
This book grounded my professional activities (design) in my spiritual interests, and triggered an ecstatic psychosis that lasted five years.

2003: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche intensified my ecstatic psychosis – and iteratively destroyed my conceptions of life and forced me to reconstitute them. Under his influence I re-grounded myself in something akin to philosophical idealism/existentialism/phenomenology and began to understand poetry and religious texts in an immediate way. The experience of reading Nietzsche was something I struggled to describe. Even the insights I had reading him defied language, and the need to communicate became increasingly painful over time.

2006: Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism
Bernstein showed me that philosophy, despite its apparent individualist character, is in fact rooted in the social. Bernstein gave me language for my experiences with Nietzsche. At first, I thought the value of Bernstein and those he inspired me to read (Gadamer and Heidegger) was merely the capacity to describe the hermeneutic process, but over the years the substance of Bernstein’s philosophy has become as important to me as Nietzsche’s.

2008: Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man
Buber opened the transcendent dimension of the inter-human and social for me – the Thou – the “where two or more are gathered in my name” – and caused me to reconsider morality and the ethics of many forms of existential philosophy and spirituality. In fact, many philosophies are attempts to persuade the thinker to practical solipsism (I’ve called it “artificial autism”) – a self-protective insulation from genuine inter-human experience. The existentialist ideal is to live in subjectively inert parallelism, each subject surrounded by objects enclosed in the thinker’s own autonomous subjectivity. The ethic of the existentialist is this: I will behave as an object within your sole subjectivity if you will return the favor to me. The existentialist is alergic to the idea of shared subjectivity: the subject is essentialy individual.

Parallax and intentionality

Biography, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I had been using the metaphor of parallax for a couple of years before Zizek’s Parallax View came out. The entire book turned out to be structured around the parallax metaphor and he used it essentially the same way. At that point in my life I was inclined to interpret that kind of coincidence as either an inevitable rediscovery of core esoteric truths or as some sort of synchronicity.

Once I learned about the connection between Hegel and Marxism, though, I realized parallax is one of the most universal and obvious examples of the dialectic form (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). If the dialectic form is a pre-existing cultural entity – and not a minor or obscure one, either – it is possible that the “rediscovery” of it was a lot more guided than it seemed to me at the time. I may not have been taught it explicity, but it is not difficult to see how it could be absorbed passively.

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The key to understanding passive cultural absorption is realizing objective conceptual thinking is only one of several forms of understanding a mind has available to it for interrelating and unifying the multifarious parts and aspects of its experience.

Naive thinkers are marked as such by their incapacity to distinguish the objective form of thought (which is ontological) from the objective being of a thing “thought about”. This observation is itself not “objective”: it exists as what I have been calling an intellectual move, or “the dance”. It’s the fundamental insight of late Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists.

Maybe I picked up the the Pragmatist dance from following along, trying to understand – trying to think-with a philosophical author, as opposed to thinking-about the apparent subject matter presented by the author in my own way, by my own pre-existing habitual moves. Maybe having been raised Unitarian-Universalist, which was a major tributary of Pragmatism, made me receptive to thinking in that way. Maybe there was a temperamental predisposition. At any rate, later, when I learned the counts and the names of the steps and the history of the dance’s invention and development, it was a factual consummation of something super-factual.

It gave objective form to a transmissible form of essentially subjective truth. It made it easier to share. Before, I’d have to demonstrate it, or indicate it with strange analogies.

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I had this thought last week and forgot to write it down:

Can we learn essentially subjective (that is, existential) truths from other subjectivities, or are we limited to objectivity – learning objective facts about subjectivity from one another?

Are we subjectively inert, sealed inside our own temperaments, and our own experiences?

Another big question: If we can learn essentially subjective truths from one another, is that best achieved through talking about subjectivity – through psychologizing? A theme I’ve encountered repeatedly among thinkers working from the Pragmatist and the Phenomenological traditions is intentionality: that there is no such thing as thinking without an object of thought. Thinking divorced from intentionality is nonsense.

Perhaps sharing a problem with another subjectivity, a problem that involves coming to a deep understanding for the sake of being able to collaborate on solving the problem is a more direct route to subjective learning than psychologizing.

I’ve even wondered if psychologizing isn’t ultimately a defence against sharing psychology – a counterfeit intimacy used as a block against authentic intimacy with the other – a sterile mutual self-exploration where shared experience is founded on sameness. Otherness is distant, sealed on the far side of an experiential membrane – never pursued, never approached, never welcomed. The radical other is an object of fascination, or fear, or mystification to be contemplated or classified but never touched.

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I see art as essentially bound up with subjective sharing.

Lesser art depends on recognition. It calls out to those who already know. Art decays into nostalgia and then pastiche.

Great art makes new knowers.

Philosophy is thought-art.

Three years with hermeneutics

Biography, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Rereading Bernstein after three years, I’m tempted to say (very tentatively) that Bernstein influenced me as radically as Nietzsche did.

Where he led me was a infinitely more vulnerable than where I was before (which, though it was painful, was tough and explosively ecstatic) but I can’t help but believe it was a movement toward something superior, at least on days when my thought is clear.

Much of spirituality is just crude philosophical self-defense. Even much or most of Christianity-Judaism is a reversion to the old pre-Judaic religion. Reading Bernstein put an the end to all that for me, and that is why so many people who were allies (in metaphysical individuality) before began to intuit a sort of treason, even before I became conscious of it myself.

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This morning I reread the section of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism that gave me the word I desperately needed to designate the bizarre world-altering experience I’d had reading Nietzsche: “hermeneutics”. I remember the relief I felt when Bernstein quoted this passage from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

Reading

Biography

I’ve been reading John Dewey in the morning. Last weekend I finished Experience and Education and started Freedom and Culture.

At night I’m reading Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis. It is one of the best-written popular philosophy/science books I’ve read. Haight knows how to make his ideas accessible without the long-windedness and stiff condescension that usually makes the genre intolerable. This is probably because he actually has a large number of substantial, nonobvious ideas to present. I imagine the challenge to his editor was probably to compact a long book to a more manageable length (what is commonly called editing), where in most books of this kind there’s exactly one semi-novel idea which could be conveyed perfectly in a short essay, pamphlet or wikipedia article, but which has been “fleshed out” – or more accurately, flabbed out – into a more profitable book-length form. I also get the sense that Haight is sharing genuine enthusiasm (and amusement) in the ideas he is presenting, where other authors seem to be calculating what ought to be interesting and fascinating to the dumbass laymen they’re stooping to edu-tain. When Haight says something humorous it is never a humor gesture; he was laughing when he wrote it. If I ever try to write a book, Haight will be my model.

Finally,  I’m doing my best to watch the Ister, tiny bits at a time.

It is interesting to me how these three works are therapeutically harmonizing. The minute I dropped Levinas and picked up Dewey I feel a hunderd times better. This is the second time I’ve had to abandon Levinas. I also found it impossible to connect with (early) Husserl. Maybe this would be a good plan: I’ll read pragmatist philosophy in the winter, and save the crazy idealist-existentialist-dionysian-esoteric metaphysics and poetry for the spring when I can understand it.

“Success is counted sweetest”

Biography
In high school my class was made to memorize this Emily Dickinson poem:
 
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
 
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
 
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
 
 

The I, the We, the Other, and transcendence

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I picked through several books today without getting traction in any one of them. I started with Richard J. Bernstein’s The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity looking for references to Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas (who is generally considered Buber’s heir). I was looking for a summary of their differences, mostly to see if there is any similarity in Levinas’s view on Other and my own. I was also interested in how Bernstein situated Levinas in his understanding of Postmodernity. I began and abandoned Levinas’s Totality and Infinity last year, and I am considering picking it up again.

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I refer to Bernstein for my sense of the postmodern landscape because I trust him as one of the “good postmodernists”, which means he has given skepticism its full, horrific due (thus “postmodernist”) but that he responds to the destruction of truth (as moderns have conceived of it) by seeking some kind of ground upon which reality can be secured, not only privately but socially (thus “good”). For me, the “bad postmodernists” are the ones who use unrestrained skepticism to insulate themselves from all appeals from their fellow subjects, whether the appeals are directly subjective (that is ethical or aesthetic or psychological) or indirectly subjective (that is, objective or empirical) by depriving conversation of any shared factual points of reference. “Bad Postmodernity” has a tendency to “slide into an attitude that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness that cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss”. “Bad postmodernity” is my term. Berstein simply places quotes around “Postmodernity” to indicate modes of thought that imitate the forms of Postmodernity without participating in the substance of the thought which actually does stand beyond the horizons of Modernity. Interestingly, Bernstein excludes both Derrida and Foucault from pseudo-Postmodernity, and presents them in a generous light that makes them seem worth reading.

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I’m in an uncomfortable, intellectually tractionless state right now. This happens to me once or twice a year. I pick around through various books, trying to pick up the scent of where I need to go next.

I think maybe these are the times I’m supposed to summarize where I am.

I’m running short on time this morning, so I will list some of my fundamental views. (I consider these views – a sort of social-existentialism – triggered by Bernstein. These kinds of thoughts began to crystallize for me in 2005, following a deep perplexity arising around the meaning of the I Ching trigrams. I semi-resolved it through reading Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Anyone who knows something about the I Ching and Bernstein’s fusion of hermeneutics and pragmatist thinking should be able to see fairly easily how I synthesized them.) The views:

  • Denial of the existence of truth is often (and I’ve been caught at times saying “always”) a defense against the impingement of the Other.
  • The impingement of the Other is experienced as a change in one’s self.
  • A change in one’s self is not experienced primarily as a change in one’s own qualities as an individual person-among-people, but as a shift in the entire world on the whole and in many parts simultaneously. In other words…
  • A change in the entire world is a holistic change.
  • Subjectivity pervades the entire world, and for practical purposes is the whole world; it is not localized in an individual’s mind.
  • Inter-subjectivity is experienced as change in one’s subjectivity and the whole world, attributable to the influence of the Other.
  • A radical change in subjectivity is impossible to understand prior to the change: it is transcendent. It is understandable only in retrospect.
  • Anxiety (or angst or dread) is the premonition of a radical change in subjectivity.
  • Perplexity is the yet unfinished radical change in subjectivity – in the whole world, which is in disarray.
  • The impulse to defend oneself against impingement of the Other is the fending off of anxiety in the face of the transcendent.
  • The Other is transcendent. The relationship with the Other, the We is also transcendent.
  • An I knows the Other in participation in We.
  • We is a greater self, a whole within which an I is a part.
  • By participating in We, an I senses its situation within greater Selfhood.
  • A We is embedded in yet greater We.
  • The concept of an ultimate We points to the personhood of God.
  • The image of God: The self composed of instincts; the friendship composed of selves; the being that arises where “two or more gathered”.

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I’m recalling a Nietzsche quote:

Where are the needy in spirit? — Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own! Now and then, however, I enjoy an even higher festival: when one is for once permitted to give away one’s spiritual house and possessions, like a father confessor who sits in his corner anxious for one in need to come and tell of the distress of his mind, so that he may again fill his hands and his heart and make light his troubled soul! He is not merely not looking for fame: he would even like to escape gratitude, for gratitude is too importunate and lacks respect for solitude and silence. What he seeks is to live nameless and lightly mocked at, too humble to awaken envy or hostility, with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience, as it were a poor-doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud of the fact! To be like a little inn which rejects no one who is in need but which is afterwards forgotten or ridiculed! To possess no advantage, neither better food nor purer air nor a more joyful spirit — but to give away, to give back, to communicate, to grow poorer! To be able to be humble, so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have much injustice done him, and to have crept through the worm-holes of errors of every kind, so as to be able to reach many hidden souls on their secret paths! For ever in a kind of love and for ever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time concealed and renouncing! To lie continually in the sunshine and gentleness of grace, and yet to know that the paths that rise up to the sublime are close by! — That would be a life! That would be a reason for a long life!

Finished

Biography, Philosophy

I’ve finished Beyond Good and Evil again, and as always it was a new book.

I’ve been furiously thematizing and cross-referencing. Some of the more interesting threads of thought:

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Nietzsche’s last book, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, was just a bunch of inter-illuminating passages selected from older works sequenced to create a portrait of Wagner as the epitome of the late romantic. My blog and wiki follow this method.

Key passage

Biography, Hermeneutics

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil, though universally relevant, is especially relevant for the designer who aspires to more than utilitarian goals (use-fulness and use-ability) and wishes to show our culture new ways of seeing, which in the parlance of the user experience industry is designated inadequately by the term “desirability”. These new ways of seeing can be quite trivial and have a strictly localized effect or they can penetrate deeply into a person’s experience of the world. What I am describing here is the essential continuum between design and true transformative art.

He who has followed the history of an individual science will find in its evolution a clue to the comprehension of the oldest and most common processes of all “knowledge and understanding”: in both cases it is the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience which are evolved first–it is only late, and then imperfectly, that our senses learn to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of understanding. It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object by producing again an image it has often produced before than by retaining what is new and different in an impression: the latter requires more strength, more “morality.” To hear something new is hard and painful for the ear; we hear the music of foreigners badly. When we hear a foreign language we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds we hear into words which have a more familiar and homely ring: thus the Germans, for example, once heard arcubalista and adapted it into Armbrust. {Armbrust: literally, “arm-breast”; both words mean “crossbow.”} The novel finds our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the case of the “simplest” processes of the senses, the emotions, such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotions of laziness, dominate.–

As little as a reader today reads all the individual words (not to speak of the syllables) of a page–he rather takes about five words in twenty haphazardly and “conjectures” their probable meaning–just as little do we see a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, color, shape; it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree. Even when we are involved in the most uncommon experiences we still do the same thing: we fabricate the greater part of the experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some event as its “inventor.” All this means: we are from the very heart and from the very first–accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.

In a lively conversation I often see before me the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree of clarity far surpasses the power of my eyesight–so that the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by me. Probably the person was making a quite different face or none whatever.

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One of my fundamental methods: to open out the meaning of individual passages I often string together scattered passages that inter-illuminate. Or, to say it as I experience it, I simply point out my own lattice of associations that spontaneously arise whenever I read something, even if I cannot articulate the connection. The form is analogical: a simple “this is like this.” The “this is like this, in that…” comes later – sometimes much later. My faith in my sometimes odd sense of analogy – my faith that is will lead me (nearly always along very uncomfortable paths) to insight – is one of my advantages as a designer and thinker, but it can lead me some strange places where people don’t really want to be.

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As anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn knows, it is anomalies that force scientific revolutions. Your sensitivity to anomalies and your readiness to question the structures and analogies that constitute knowledge determine the point where you break from the dominant paradigm and allow it to dissolve back into the anomalies (the phenomenal flux, the primordial chaos) from which it came before it was formed by language and logic into knowledge. This dissolution permits new analogies, new ways to makes sense, new ways to spontaneously experience the world, new ways to love.

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I like to place the words “design” and “designate” side by side and think about them together.

Design is a microcosm of culture. That is why I care about design.

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I’ve always liked the Shins “Mine’s Not a High Horse”: “These are the muddy waters / I’m swimming in to make a living / Were I to drown in them / Should come as no surprise.”

Win-win

Biography

What allowed me to return to work after hiding out for several years in an excessively undemanding environment was a key insight: the pain that had made work intolerable was not meaningless, but was in fact latent philosophical problems pressing for illumination and resolution. When pain and productivity go together, the options generally come down to feeling good or doing good work, and both are more than acceptable.

Useful, usable and desirable

Biography

We live our lives practically, tending to the necessities, seeking convenience. The time left over we spend on the pleasantries of life. We work hard, then we play hard.

We design our lives around usefulness and usability, then try to tack on a little desirability at the end of the process.

This cannot continue.

We must expect much, much more.

If you want to feel content with your life, avoid me. I will sow the seeds of discontent in you so that you will have no rest until you love your life and want to outlive your life.

Loving your life means your life needs no justification. You look out at the world and just love.

I have no respect for the ideal of painless comfort.