There comes a point when how you think imposes tangible limits on what you can think.

A problem is recognized — felt — but when you try to think it out, you arrive at the edge of thinkability. You cannot resolve this problem with the intellectual moves that ordinarily work to resolve your everyday problems.

If you are precise and honest with yourself, you will realize something disturbing: at this point what you most painfully lack is not an answer, but a clear question. You cannot even articulate the problem.

Our minds do not know what to do with such a situation. We don’t even know how to talk about this experience. We are completely oriented by metaphors of objects existing positively in a negative space that’s given: and this space is reality itself.

But here, the very space for the problem is lacking. Our minds boggles at this, just as it boggles when we try to contemplate what stands beyond the limits of space, or what occur beyond the limits of time. It is literally inconceivable.

Such situations are not uncommon, even in the flatlands of business. So we might as well agree on some vocabulary for this situation:

• An inarticulate problem that remains inarticulate because it stands outside the current limits of thinkability is a perplexity.
• The distinctive, painful feeling that accompanies perplexities is anxiety. This feeling is always uncomfortable, but when it is accepted as the birth pangs of genuinely new idea it becomes a far more acceptable part of the labor and delivery of innovations.
• The limits of thinkability in a particular approach to a problem is an intellectual horizon.
• Perplexities are resolvable by the peculiar and perpetually misunderstood activity known as philosophy.

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What? Philosophy useful in business?

Ask a dozen people to list the ten most useless things any person can do, and philosophy will top the list. When an exasperated project manager exclaims “We don’t have time to philosophize!” nobody questions the wisdom of such practical thinking — or its practicality.

However, it is precisely here, when a group faces situations it does not know how to think out — where people become most anxious and most impatient and most inclined to just pick something and go with it — that philosophy is most useful and is in fact the very cornerstone of eventual success.

According to Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.” Is this not exactly when a company goes outside and hires someone to help it find its way out of a problem it doesn’t understand?

Yet, even consultancies — companies whose very purpose is to help other companies in this situation — are stuffed with anti-philosophical “pragmatists” whose life purpose is to simply get things done. Under the stress of anxiety such people reject the very thing that will bring them success. They stop thinking, stop listening and put their noses to the millstone.

This is how most of their projects go. Most of their projects turn out pretty unspectacular, but since they’ve never experienced a spectacular outcome, and because spectacular outcomes are uncommon, anyway, nobody blames them, nobody blames their client for their unspectacular, unlovable, unexceptional non-success, and nobody gets fired — so good enough. And emails go out calling the bunt a home run, and an assemblage of best practices an innovation, etc., etc. etc. and this is what makes corporations so damn corporate. But at least they didn’t have to confront anxiety.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

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The reason few companies innovate is not that they lack intelligence or ingenuity or ideas — it’s that they are organizationally unprepared to face the perplexities and the anxiety intrinsic to innovation.

They misdiagnose the painful feelings of things going right as something going dreadfully wrong, and inadvertently abort the innovation process.

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Most people, most of the time will try to make the absence of a clear question go away by making up things that resemble answers, that seem more or less related to what the question could be or ought to be. As long as the answer fits the shibbolethic standards of the culture to which it is addressed (that is, it has an appropriately truthy consistency) and does not offend or impinge on anyone (inconsequentiality is the surest strategy for accomplishing this), it is generally accepted as an answer.

Different thoughts require different degrees and kinds of cooperation to be understood at all.

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If you think true thoughts are self-evidently true — not only requiring no cooperation but actively overcoming all resistance and doubt by virtue of their truth — you’ll be protected from all truly new thoughts.

And also, if you believe that a thought that requires cooperation is necessarily delusional/ideological, you’ll also never learn anything outside of your own thought schema, which, by the way, includes your conception of truth as self-evident…

I’d love to occupy myself with fun activities, games, travel, etc. but I am too busy reading and thinking. If I had as much free time as you, maybe I’d do all that stuff.

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Fact is, I don’t do any of those things people do for fun because I don’t love any of it.

And you don’t read and think as much as I do because you don’t love it. And that is OK.

What is not OK is acting like the only reason someone might spend time reading and thinking is that the person happens to have a surplus of free time — which is probably gained at someone else’s expense.

The story goes like this: “We’d ALL love to sit around dreaming up great ideas, if we weren’t so busy. Lucky you, dreamer. Wish the rest of us were so lucky.”

Bullshit.

Busy people are always inventing pleasurable hassles for themselves — fulfilling, entertaining or distracting complications to fill in the gaps between duties — and they never, ever have free time. They don’t permit the time to free up, because they don’t want it free. And for the same reason, they don’t define it and defend it and keep it free.

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Busyness is a taste that some have and others lack, just like what time of day you like most. Morning people are no better than anyone else — and busy people are just busy people. It’s nothing to be proud of or ashamed of.

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We make time for what we care about.

We can’t decide to care or not care, love or not love. We can try to cultivate caring or love or to starve them in the hope that they atrophy, weaken or die. But caring and love are living, growing things.

We can’t expect anyone to miraculously produce love or care for anything ex nihilo, but existent love will sometimes try to cultivate new loves for the sake of a beloved person. And according to most, in word and resounding action: sometimes won’t.

Science produces the firmest truths we have, not because its methods provide us the best access to reality, but rather because it is the most social approach to truth that humankind has devised.

By “most social” I mean that the scientific ethic includes (at least) three ideals friendly to the establishment of shared sense of reality among the members of a community:

1. Science pursues universal agreement about a world understood as a universe: an out-there world, shared by all people, about which universal agreement is possible.
2. Participants in science expect to (and are expected to) communicate their findings to the larger scientific community, and to respond to challenges and criticism from that community, and to accept the larger community as referee of the proceedings.
3. The process of sharing truth is mediated by empirical phenomena and logic, which, of our myriad modes of understanding (sense-making of the world), are the most universally accessible.

Each of these ideals can be attacked, and the attacks are in fact valid ones. However, the social consequences of these attacks are dire:

1. Whether or not a universe of the kind assumed by science exists or not, and whether or not it can be proven finally to exist, the concept of universe is conducive to pursuit of agreement. (One source of anxiety over relativism is the abandonment of pursuit of agreement, and its political consequences.)
2. Whether the larger community is in fact always an unbiased, competent and univocal referee is debatable, but its assumed legitimacy and respect for its office is essential to the scale of scientific collaboration. The community must be taken to be one’s jury of peers and not a litigant against whom one is appealing to some higher judge — most often some political or religious faction, or a vindicating, enlightened future more receptive to one’s own version of the truth. In science, contempt of court is punishable by excommunication (in every sense of the word, including deprivation of any intellectual afterlife).
3. Since the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions the philosophical world has become increasingly sensitive to the roles modes of understanding outside simple empiricism and rational thought play in science. Prior to Kuhn, even the staunches advocates of such extra-rational/empirical modes of understanding tended to exclude them from the realm of science. After Kuhn, the line between natural and social sciences appeared blurrier. However, as important as these other modes of understanding are — the practical consequence of taking empiricism and rationalism as not only absolute but supreme places emphasis on what is most sharable gives science its universalist trajectory.

Notice, every point I’m posing here supports science, but not from an epistemological foundation, but a social and pragmatist angle.

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For fun: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=293&act=3

Youth tends to be all about production and reproduction: putting new beings into the world.

And our youth-cult culture is also entirely oriented toward products, productivity, and production on ever-increasing scale.

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When the youthful mind thinks about the new, what is conceived is a novel thing that nobody has seen before. There might be a sense or full awareness of some visionary difference, but that difference will be expressed and encountered as a new product of some kind that coming from some new “place”, and capable of leading a receptive soul there.

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Middle age is (for me, anyway) about the recognition that every production comes from and appears in some sort of intellectual/spiritual space — but also that space can be generated or it can atrophy. Some situations are ontologically expansive, accommodating many kinds of being and presenting opportunities for them to interact. Other situations are ontologically constrictive, admitting either one uniform kind of being, or a strictly defined system of types that interact in prescribed ways. And the same situation can move back and forth between these poles, expanding and contracting in response to its inner and outer workings.

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Imagine what a life dedicated to space-creation might look, sound, speak and act like.

One take-away from these interviews I’m doing: If you are a parent, please don’t “do your best.” Be so urgently concerned with your child’s well-being that you reach beyond what’s reasonable and possible. In other words: love your children.

What’s the difference between a right and an entitlement?

Next time you find yourself claiming a “right” to something, substitute the word “entitlement” and see how your claim sounds.

Maybe your user is actually a collective.

I think I’ve become a feeling-type-in-training. It’s annoying to be a beginner, to have to bungle things, and always, necessarily, in front of at least one other person. It’s like learning a foreign language or karate.

When you’re an “objective” rationalist you can explain other people’s emotions away as subjective and irrational. Give up that little baseless prejudice, you realize there is in fact a better and worse to interactions that has little to do with easily argued they are.

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Does this midlife development represent a reversal of my old convictions? Not at all. It is a continuous development from my old position, which led from a monistic conception of The Truth which is discovered rationally, to pluralistic truths which can humbly coexist in semi-rational relation to an inaccessible Truth, to a social conception of thought, which replaces rationality and logic — which governs thinkability, but not reality itself — with reason, which is using thinking as a bridge between the thinker and the social and natural world. Once you arrive at this point, you start to understand what feeling types seem born knowing: that each person has one’s own experience, and that experience is at least as real as a brick hurtling toward your head, thrown by an indignant anti-solipsist.

And I hope feeling types will see this and ask: What’s the analogous experience for a feeling type? What’s thinking-type-in-training look like? Hint: It’s one thing to respect another person’s experience and its another to grasp its inner logic… Can you really claim to love someone if you don’t really try to know who that person is? And can you really claim to have tried to know who a person is if you haven’t tried to understand how that person thinks about things? And how is that accomplished except by trying (even unsuccessfully) to follow their thoughts?

In the end, thinking and feeling are inseparable.

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Perhaps this is why the androgyne is a traditional symbol of unity and unification on either side of differentiation.

Humanity is a destiny we choose, and we choose it by pursuing it.

Humanity is not a birthright, and it does not entitle anyone to any privileges other than itself.

What if, through no fault of your own, the way you live makes you stupid — and stupider by the day?

What if the things you have to do, which fill the most productive hours of your day and consume your best energy, also constrict and stiffen your intellect? What if increasing your efficiency means limiting the realities you can consider and stunting your sense of what life is? What if that thing that we want to protect against the infinite demands of other people is our intellect itself? And the more of it we lose, the less able we are to preserve it, because we lose simultaneously both the desire and the capacity to hold onto it?

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Intelligence is as subject to infinite deferral as our dreams.

Continue reading Choices →

Attributed to William James:

“When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It’s not important.’

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say ‘Anyway, it’s not new.'”

If anyone can help me locate the source of this quote, I’d be grateful.

Choose one: 1) Love of your worldview. 2) Love of other living beings.

Continue reading Worldviews over people →

Thinking is reasonable, but sterile.

Intuition is fertile, but tyrannical.

Group creativity requires both fertility and reason.

A researcher who read too much asked his client a question rarely asked in business:

“Imagine you had a choice of two research documents, one red and one blue. The red document provides a comprehensive and highly accurate account of the situation your company is facing. However if this document is fully understood and believed it will overwhelm your employees with possibilities, open new controversies and make it ten times harder to make decisions. The blue document is much less comprehensive and less factual than the first. In fact many hard-nosed realists will find it abstract and even a little vague. However, this document is understood and believed, it will make your employees feel that they have a handle on your company’s situation, they’ll find it easier to come to agreements, and those agreements will be ones that will profit your company.”

From Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks:

Mechanical force is known to us only as a feeling of resistance: and pressing and pushing are only palpable interpretations of this, not explanations.

What is the nature of the coercion that a stronger soul exerts upon a weaker one? — And it would be possible that what seemed to be ‘disobedience’ to the higher soul actually arose from a failure to understand its will, e.g., a rock cannot be commanded. But — the differentiation of degree and rank must be gradual: only the closest relatives can understand each other, and consequently it’s here that there can be obedience.

Might it be possible to view all movements as signs of psychological happenings? Natural science as a symptomatology —

It may be wrong to take the fact that the formations of life are very small (e.g., cells) as a reason to search for even smaller units, ‘force-points’, etc. ?

The preliminary stage of structures of mastery.

Devotion to the person (father, forebear, prince, priest, god) as facilitating morality.

What sort of economic conditions would arise if, instead of basing our currency on some quantum of precious metal, we instead based it on the precise amount of  happiness destroyed in earning it? So, the purchaser of a 50 cent pack of gum would labor at some painfully tedious or loathsome task until he has sacrificed a quantum of happiness exactly equaling that gained from chewing a pack of gum. A house would cost exactly the sum of happiness of inhabiting it. That seems exactly fair to me.

Continue reading Ideas and observations →