Philosophy is practical literature.
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Literary immersion lets us try on a philosophy. We don’t suspend reality — we provisionally swap realities.
If we prefer the literary reality, we might want to keep it.
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The best reading recalls what memory cannot possess.
In other words reading can be prayer.
Marty Neumeier’s positioning statement: “We are the only X that does Y.”
Dan Saffer’s hunt statement: “I am going to research X so that I can do Y.”
(Do not sneer. The most amazing insights are the ones so simple and retroactively obvious you cannot believe that you didn’t already know them. Literally: you cannot believe you didn’t know them, and so you don’t believe it, and so you credit yourself with having conceived it yourself.)
I am going to try to boil everything I know into X/Y statements.
When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort.
My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service.
Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world of building objects and utilizing tools as means to this end. He rejects precisely the cornerstone of service, utilizing the time and effort of human beings and reducing them to mere resources.
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A trial lawyer is an expert in using coercive reason against aggressive and unreceptive minds, and usually in order to persuade witnesses observing the exchange from an outside “objective” perspective, not the partner involved in the exchange. Reason is used to buttress one’s own position and to undermine the opposing position. And the conversation is more staged than real.
A teacher is an expert in using collaborative reason in dialogue with cooperative and receptive minds. The exchange is meant to persuade the partner, and is not (primarily) performed for witnesses. Reason is used to reveal the strengths of each position as well as to expose weaknesses, but less for the sake of advocating or eliminating unworthy positions than to spur creativity and to improve the positions, or to find paths to superior positions.
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A trial lawyer in a classroom teaches by destroying stupidity and clearing the ground for new ideas.
A teacher in a courtroom creates possibilities in a space overcrowded with offensiveness and defensiveness.
Factual knowledge is “knowing that.” Here language is in its element.
Practical knowledge is “knowing how.” Here knowing is half-mute. Telling only complements showing.
Moral knowledge is “knowing why.” Here knowing ought to be mute.
All generals believe in the existence of the battle they’re about to fight against one another.
They probably also agree on many facts concerning battle conditions: the terrain, the weather, the disposition of the forces, and where they disagree it has less to do with opinion than it does the availability of facts.
Beliefs diverge when they consider one another’s intentions, perceptions and character, and the psychological state of the men in their charge.
The generals must disagree on who ought to win the battle.
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Many types of agreement exist, and each requires different methods for resolution. Consider the differences between dis/agreements of perceptions, facts, insights and morals.
From Buber’s Between Man and Man:
Sometimes I hear it said that every I and Thou is only superficial, deep down word and response cease to exist, there is only the one primal being unconfronted by another. We should plunge into the silent unity, but for the rest leave its relativity to the life to be lived, instead of imposing on it this absolutized I and absolutized Thou with their dialogue.
Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity. But I do not know — what the soul willingly imagines and indeed is bound to imagine (mine too once did it) — that in this I had attained to a union with the primal being or the godhead. That is an exaggeration no longer permitted to the responsible understanding. Responsibly — that is, as a man holding his ground before reality — I can elicit from those experiences only that in them I reached an undifferentiable unity of myself without form or content. I may call this an original pre-biographical unity and suppose that it is hidden unchanged beneath all biographical change, all development and complication of the soul. Nevertheless, in the honest and sober account of the responsible understanding this unity is nothing but the unity of this soul of mine, whose “ground” I have reached, so much so, beneath all formations and contents, that my spirit has no choice but to understand it as the groundless. But the basic unity of my own soul is certainly beyond the reach of all the multiplicity it has hitherto received from life, though not in the least beyond individuation, or the multiplicity of all the souls in the world of which it is one — existing but once, single, unique, irreducible, this creaturely one: one of the human souls and not the “soul of the All”; a defined and particular being and not “Being”; the creaturely basic unity of a creature, bound to God as in the instant before release the creature is to the creator spiritus, not bound to God as the creature to the creator spiritus in the moment of release.
The unity of his own self is not distinguishable in the man’s feeling from unity in general. For he who in the act or event of absorption is sunk beneath the realm of all multiplicity that holds sway in the soul cannot experience the cessation of multiplicity except as unity itself. That is, he experiences the cessation of his own multiplicity as the cessation of mutuality, as revealed or fulfilled absence of otherness. The being which has become one can no longer understand itself on this side of individuation nor indeed on this side of I and Thou. For to the border experience of the soul “one” must apparently mean the same as “the One”.
But in the actuality of lived life the man in such a moment is not above but beneath the creaturely situation, which is mightier and truer than all ecstasies. He is not above but beneath dialogue. He is not nearer the God who is hidden above I and Thou, and he is farther from the God who is turned to men and who gives himself as the I to a Thou and the Thou to an I, than that other who in prayer and service and life does not step out of the position of confrontation and awaits no wordless unity, except that which perhaps bodily death discloses.
Nevertheless, even he who lives the life of dialogue knows a lived unity: the unity of life, as that which once truly won is no more torn by any changes, not ripped asunder into the everyday creaturely life and the “deified” exalted hours; the unity of unbroken, raptureless perseverance in concreteness, in which the word is heard and a stammering answer dared.
Meditating on Yeats’ “Second Coming”.
It is often assumed (by skeptical natures) that “passionate intensity” is what defines “the worst” and that “lack of conviction” is the prescription to cure it.
This in fact is a state of severe imbalance. The best must rediscover their passion — but a complex one that reaches beyond the biological and psychological self without losing them. The center must hold as the gyre opens.
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The synthesis of self and other resolves in such a way that the terms of the antitheses become authenticity and address.
If the 17th-18th centuries exalted perception, and the 19th-20th centuries exalted conception, can we agree in the 21st-22nd centuries to exalt tranception?
It’s very important to note the fact that whenever we lose the capacity to interpret reality according to the norms we’ve been taught, what we experience is not a net loss but a gain. Beneath all our knowledge and habitual perception is something fascinating and good, though terrifying.
Psychedelic: ORIGIN 1950s: formed irregularly from Greek psukhe ‘breath, life, soul.’ + delos ‘clear, manifest’ + –ic .
Psychedelic art reminds a mind that “all the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”
Many people out there — more than you think — inhabit private worlds stocked with behaving automatons. Some of these automatons refuse to behave in an orderly and comprehensible manner. You may have been an automaton to one of these people at some point.
If such a person finds your behavior unintelligible, he (rarely is it a she) will impose intelligibility.
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Powerful solipsists make rules to enforce their solipsism.
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Some rules exist for the sake of the individual.
Some rules exist for the sake of the group.
Some rules exist for the sake of the institution.
Some rules exist for the sake of the ruler.
But most rules exist for the sake of staving off anxieties, or for annihilating perplexities.
What is common to everybody?
According to everybody this is the totality of what exists.
It’s not enough to find common ground and stand on that. Common ground is a nice way to say “the lowest common denominator”.
Finding common ground is a means to relating specifically to what is not common — to going beyond ourselves and participating in something supra-individual.
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The belief that people must explicitly agree on all matters of importance is very arbitrary and strange.
What if our ears and our eyes behaved that way?
Eye: “A trumpet is shiny and metalic!”
Ear: “No, it is piercing and bright.”
Eye: “I don’t know what you mean by piercing, but I do agree it is bright.”
Ear: “And brilliant!”
Eye: “Yes. Agreed: a trumpet is bright and brilliant.”
The more important the matter, the more our agreements are merely apparent.
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What matters is not the sameness of our beliefs but the compatibility of the beliefs.
The ear perceives a sound and the eye perceives an image, and common sense conceives a trumpet.
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Perceive: from Latin percipere ‘seize, understand,’ from per– ‘entirely’ + capere ‘take.’
Conceive: from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take.’
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One intuition perceives one meaning in a situation and another intuition perceives a different meaning. Reason takes them together as a concept.
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Affirming what we are: recognition. Affirming what we are not: blessing.
“Works of art are indeed always products of being in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further.”
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The resolutely independent run the risk of complete solitude.
In solitude, a person shares so little reality with others that the background of reality stays visible. To put it another way: chaos blindness is lost.
The unavoidable remnant of shared reality doesn’t matter. A solitary person is often contemptuous of “mere” facts. What matters is the sense we add to our senses: that by which a fact is significant; a sign of what can only be known obliquely by sign.
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Intellectual solitude is solitary confinement in plain sight. Only the terribleness of the condition can be observed. The condition itself is invisible because the condition is invisibility.
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One perspective cannot be observed from another.
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Some independent minds give up on mutual understanding. They learn to content themselves with leaving deep impressions on the senseless senses of others: memory depth-bombs that go off in the event that understanding ever becomes possible. This is why poets fuck with people.
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Some minds have triggered chain reactions lasting millennia.
An explosion in the chain can ignite more fire or snuff a spark.
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One technique for extinguishing a forest fire is to drop dynamite on it. The explosion consumes all available oxygen and the fire instantly starves. (Most rebirths are stillbirths.)
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Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with an accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your centre, in an arch
from the great bridge building of God:
why catching then becomes a power —
not yours, a world’s.
Design thinking, though slightly more expansive than typical management thinking, still remains within the horizons of utilitarianism. To put it in Hannah Arendt’s language, the designer type still falls within the category homo faber.
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There’s doing what’s always done. Execution.
There’s thinking about doing what’s always done. Management.
There’s rethinking what’s always done in order to find a better way of doing. Design thinking.
There’s rethinking our thinking: how we think about what we do…
There’s rethinking ought: why we do what we do…
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“There are so many days that have not yet broken”
Peter Schmidt quotes:
“One of the functions of art is to offer a more desirable reality; a model as it were, of another style of existence with its own pace and its own cultural reference.”
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“If you have an extraordinary problem don’t try to solve it in the ordinary way.”
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“Journeys down unexpected paths are difficult to retrace.”
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“If I believe in the ideas of people who think I am stupid, then I am stupid.”
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Industry: late 15c., “cleverness, skill,” from Old French. industrie, from Latin industria “diligence,” fem. of industrius “industrious, diligent,” used as a noun, from early Latin indostruus “diligent,” from indu “in, within” + stem of struere “to build” (see structure).
Structure: mid-15c., “action or process of building or construction,” from Latin structura “a fitting together, adjustment, building,” from structus, pp. of struere “to pile, build, assemble,” related to strues “heap,” from Proto-Indo-European stere– “to spread, extend, stretch out” (cf. Sanskrit. strnoti “strews, throws down;” Avestan star– “to spread out, stretch out;” Greek stronymi “strew,” stroma “bedding, mattress,” sternon “breast, breastbone;” Latin sternere “to stretch, extend;” Old Church Slavonic stira, streti “spread,” strama “district;” Russian stroji “order;” Gothic straujan, Old High German strouwen, Old English streowian “to sprinkle, strew;” Old English streon “strain,” streaw “straw, that which is scattered;” Old High German stirna “forehead,” strala “arrow, lightning bolt;” Old Irish fo-sernaim “spread out,” srath “a wide river valley;” Welsh srat “plain”). Meaning “that which is constructed, a building or edifice” is from 1610s. Structured “organized so as to produce results” is from 1959.
(The Online Etymology Dictionary is a treasure.)
Fake taboo-busters like Lady Gaga play right into the hands of puritans.
It is in the best interests of puritans to draw as much attention as possible to sins of the flesh. These fiery motes are easily seen by dull eyes, they’re distractingly sparkly, they dance in the air entertainingly, and also have a claim to practical danger, because they really can start household fires.
The real beam in America’s eye, however — the real problem puritans are invested in missing — is that we exalt industry above every other love, including the love of our children, and of our future.
And we don’t even love industry. We just serve it. We serve it unconditionally. Despite our nominal denominations, industry is our god and our true religion. Industry is the irrational root of all other values, and we will not look directly at its face, much less question it.