When we unthinkingly project a simplistic dichotomy of objectivity versus subjectivity on our life experiences, we make real insight much more difficult than it ought to be.

Obviously, a researcher doesn’t want to rely entirely on subjectivity. The entire purpose of research is to challenge our own subjective assumptions, prejudices and habitual interpretations with facts that help us to better ways of thinking.

But to counter the neglect or denial of reality with strict objectivity — that is to work exclusively with empirical observation and logical construction of conclusions — is not only unnecessary, it involves a denial of another kind of reality, and is perhaps just as damaging as reckless ignorant intuition.

Fact is, no matter how firmly we try to ground our theories in hard fact, the theories are not derived purely and exclusively from those facts. Something is always added, and it is only this addition that places the facts in meaningful relation. We are always intuiting patterns of some kind — often unconsciously — and these intuitions guide both our perceptions and our actions. To behave as if this is not happening is to turn a blind eye to precisely what we are trying to catch sight of.

The dialectical synthesis of these two extreme positions is to take from objectivity its attentive respect for reality, and to take from subjectivity its capacity to intuit patterns, and to combine them in a reciprocal process of informing one’s intuition, and then scrupulously testing one’s intuitions against observed reality.

The formula is “leap forward; scrutinize backwards.”

*

One other thing that badly needs saying: Research is the disciplined pursuit of learning from people. The researcher sometimes must help research participants teach effectively. All the elaborate techniques researchers use in the field and in analysis must serve the purpose of effective teaching and learning. Unfortunately, often the techniques are used for the opposite purpose. Research can also be designed in a way that prevents certain kinds of learning — and this is roughly proportional to how structured the research is. Unstructured in-context interviews are limited only by what can be said and shown. A structured survey limits what can be said to A or B or C.

The same is true of workshop exercises. Highly structured exercises impose a pre-existent schema on what can be learned, and discourages and prevents the development of some possibilities.

The most sophisticated technique at the researcher’s disposal is conversation.

*

Temple Grandin, despite her autism, has learned to interact with people. Her technique involves careful observation of behaviors, subsequent recognizing patterns, then responding to the patterns strategically. The responses are tested against the expected result. She interacts with human behavior as a physicist interacts with the behaviors of matter.

Most non-autistic people — “neurotypicals” as Grandin calls them — are equipped with an intuitive sense that guides us and makes it possible to interact without all the conscious observation and rational interpretation, and strategic response. We just know what to do, and do it. Of course, this can be taken to an extreme, and the glare of our innate sense of meaning can distract us from detecting clues pointing to other forms of meaning (such as those Grandin keyed into which helped her understand the experience of livestock in slaughterhouses).

Businesses tend to manage themselves in such a way as to make themselves collectively autistic. They blind, silence and paralyze intuition on principle — then try to add it back late in the process through marketing and advertising.

In the middle ages priests could intimidate the laity with their complex theological arguments — spoken in Latin — and their knowledge of elaborate rituals to be performed at particular times according to a complicated church calendar.

Today we laugh at all this priestly nonsense, and instead put our trust in experts who intimidate the shit out of us with complex concepts spoken in specialized jargon and mathematical formulas, who have mastered elaborate techniques for performing their professional functions orchestrated in intricately complicated project plans.

Every age has its shibboleths of authority, and it rarely occurs to anyone to question the basis of the authority. They just hear something mystifying and scary and decide to retreat from confrontation out of fear of looking ignorant. But ignorant of what? If we are ignorant of inconsequential bullshit running around in self-referential circles, who cares about knowing it?

The trick is calling bullshit on the whole thing, and demanding to see the fruits. What does all this quantification of angels dancing on heads of pins amount to?

*

The most socially intelligent people I know would not be able to sell you on their social skills, if they were forced to do so by the normal methods of establishing credibility in the business world. They wouldn’t be able to outline their techniques for putting people at ease, promoting harmony, making everyone feel included and valued, for making people feel good about who they are. Nor could they create an action plan to take a group of individuals from feeling so-so to ecstatically happy, with set milestones where progress can be measured and with a fixed outcome of a particular level of well-being and pre-defined perceptions of themselves and the group.

If someone were to interrogate one of these socially intelligent people on how they would meet these very reasonable expectations and demand answers on their techniques, their success metrics, their high- and low-level plan. They would look like they didn’t know what they were doing.

Fact is, the interrogator would be the one who did not know what he was doing — but nobody would notice.

This happens constantly — and nobody notices.

This is what is fucking up our world.

This is how most decisions are made in the business world — and the larger the organization the more this is the case. Increasingly in education and also in government, decisions are made in this way, because we think business knows the best way to get results. When we when we apply businessy techniques and get really shitty results, it doesn’t occur to us to question the techniques themselves.

*

We don’t know how to think about intuition, tacit knowledge, tacit know-how, aesthetics, or moral values. We subject them all to the same idiotic kind of interrogation, never inquiring into the legitimacy of the interrogation.

Then we wonder why, with all our fantastic quantitative analytic tools, with our amazing technical sophistication, with all our training and expertise we can’t seem to improve our lives.

It’s because, despite all our factual and technical mastery we don’t pay attention to 90% of our experience because we don’t know how to win it intellectual legitimacy — and this is in fact, precisely the part of our experience that matters. It is the cornerstone of our flourishing.

*

There’s incredibly little correlation between shibbolethic fluency and the capacity to win real results. It’s time we start judging trees by the fruit, and not on the pedigree of the seed, or the soil, or the cultivation technique. Further own tongues should serve as witnesses. Devices that measure the chemical composition of substances will not do.

*

A quote to meditate on: “Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).”

When a person stays above a conflict in can mean any number of things. It can mean that someone is an outsider and can safely ignore it. Or it can mean that though he is involved he does not have anything important to lose. Or that he is unable to understand or influence the outcome of the conflict, and is resigned to living with the outcome, whatever it is. Or that he can see that the conflict is inconsequential, and that its outcome will affect nothing (which is often a pose of those who actually do not understand a conflict). Or that he already knows the outcome, and knows the conflict is irrelevant. Or that the outcome will ultimately be decided by himself, because he hold the power to impose his will.

Yet, none of these are really “above”. They’re either removed from the conflict, or passively involved in it, or actively involved but in a position to prevail.

To be above a conflict, a person must see the limited validity of all sides of a conflict, which means to understand the full rightness of each position and the sense in which each position is not right enough. In other words, being “above the fray” is a function of dialectical thought. However, because people who have never thought dialectically and lack awareness of the possibility of dialectical resolution as well as the experience of this dialectical depth and height (which is simply a position one takes along the dimension of depth that permits an exteriorized, synoptic survey-view of things understood from the inside), the expression is leveled down along with other similar formulas such as “overcoming” (which becomes a synonym for defeating) and “getting over” things (which means simply getting accustomed to or distracted from a problem), or having “deep knowledge” (which means simply very thorough and detailed factual and practical knowledge in some area).

*

To test someone’s depth, don’t look for quantity of information, but capacity for grasping a situation in terms of multiple perspectives and possibilities.

*

A physicist can have vast knowledge of his subject, and incredible mastery of the concepts and methods, yet have no depth of knowledge at all. A freshmen physics student who is unable to perform in the lab or answer many basic physics questions might have very sparse and flawed knowledge of physics, yet possess deeper understanding of science than many professional scientists, by virtue of his liberation from naive realism.

When an object encounters against an impenetrable barrier, it tends to compress into it, and then expand against it. It is possible that the very best scientific laborers are the most shallow, but thorough and disciplined thinkers. It might be that the best revolutionary scientists are the ones who were the greatest dupes and suffered the most dramatic disillusionment in respect to naive realism.

When given a gift, accept the gift and do not steal it.

*

To take possession of the object of the gift as if it were merely a transfer of property, is to betray the spirit of gift-giving.

A gift is an exchange of humanity. The object is only the medium of exchange. The object is essential, but the object is not the essence.

*

Some people when offered a service, prefer to steal the labor, and then pay for the labor with money. The labor is bought, but the goodwill is not.

*

Many wealthy people look out on a world in which everything can be bought, and whatever cannot be bought is nonexistent. They go into deep debt in ways they refuse to understand and react angrily when they default.

*

The theft of a gift leaves a distinctive empty feeling that is hard to speak about.

In casual conversation, in business transactions, in love — it happens all the time.

We suffer from it and inflict it incessantly.

*

Money is a conventional fiction used by societies for the purposes of distribution of resources. When the fiction stops serving its purpose, it’s time to get real.

Three major predators threaten mojo: skepticism, empathy and tedium.

Skepticism is easily overcome.

The key to controlling empathy is to realize the mutability of feeling. Violence often yields gratefully to a whisper.

Tedium is best left to the tedious.

Peter’s Principle is a side-effect of a world epidemic of the blind leading the blind.

*

A human being must eat or he will die. Therefore, the purpose of a human being is to eat.

Absurd?

Ask a few random people what the purpose of a business is, and then ask them to explain their answer.

*

Most people do not know how to think about or talk about Why questions.

They are unaware of the the fact that for each of us a tacit sense of Why illuminates reality and determines what we see.

Lacking this fundamental awareness, they are even more oblivious to how Why reflects from the skin of things in the form of relevance.

Least of all are they aware that this sense of relevance leads us to ask some kinds of questions and to neglect other kinds of questions.

The horizons of our intellect are drawn by the questions we know how to ask.

*

Peter’s Principle happens when a person gets promoted to a position that requires the ability to ask questions that he does not know how to ask.

Instead of learning to ask new questions he dispenses with asking questions and cuts straight to answers of the kind that have worked for him in the past.

Why? he is asked? “Because we are making this.”

Why? “Because this is how things are done.”

According to similarly incapacitated people (in all likelihood, his boss) — he has the answers. He has a clear goal and a clear plan for getting there.

*

Utilitarians see no reason why schools, nations — the whole world — shouldn’t be run like a huge company.

Why not? How else should they be run?

A utilitarian sees no alternative, and therefore there is none.

*

As recently as a century ago wealthy industrialists were looked down upon by certain people as crass and barbaric. That was before industrialists took over education and made sure education taught everyone no alternative than to look up at them.

There’s nothing paradoxical about Peter’s Principle. It is the consequence of how we think about business.

Our way of thinking about business determines what kind of person is best qualified to lead a business.

When this kind of person is identified as a leader, he is put in the position to award promotions and to determine the principles by which promotions are awarded.

*

What if what is required to lead a business is essentially knowing how to make an organization flourish by putting the right people in the right places?

A leader who allows (or causes) Peter’s Principle to undermine his organization is the embodiment of Peter’s Principle.

*

Peter’s Principle manifests first at the very top (or at least requires an overpromoted incompetent at the top if it is to remain untreated), but its root cause is cultural.

*

In the United States business was not made for humanity, but, rather, humanity for business.

A man who knows how to put humanity in service of business — or as they prefer to say it “utilize human resources to maximize growth and profits” — is, in our eyes, the ideal business leader.

*

In the United States, nobody says that the purpose of the individual citizen is to serve the collective. *

In the United States, everyone says that the purpose of the individual employee is to serve the business. **

If we ever put a classic C-level executive in the White House it will be the end of the end of the United States.

Sure as shit, we will eventually put a classic C-level executive in the White House.

We are more loyal to the ideal of the C-level executive than we are to the principles of the Constitution. We don’t actually want the reality of freedom. We want freedom as a national symbol. It could just as easily be “strength” or “unity” or “righteousness.”

—-

NOTES:

(* …Except in the case of an emergency, of course. If some distant petty tyrant is saying hostile things about our nation to his citizens and entertains fantasies of one day harming the United States, the luxury of individual rights should be temporarily suspended until the threat is neutralized.)

(** What is collectivist, authoritarian American patriot to do? In order to be a true American patriot and really hold to our collective ideals he must paradoxically reject all his deepest patriotic drives, and renounce his deepest collectivist desires. He is forced to embrace emergencies — conditions in which he must suspend American values and behave in a radically anti-American manner for the sake of the protection of America and its ideals. And, of course, to support the maximum expansion of business into the lives of every American, which is tantamount to the expansion of collectivism and unbridled authority into the details of each person’s life. But, since this collectivism and near-totalitarian authority comes from the private sphere and not from government, our freedom is understood to be intact, despite the fact that 90% of our waking activities are completely involuntary, and if we are honest with ourselves we completely lack the spiritual and material resources to escape this condition. And this is absolutely acceptable by most people’s intellectual criteria — and also their bodies and spirits, after being administered a gram of soma.)

Intuition is not reasonable. It behaves like an animal: it sniffs the air, detects movement, spots patterns and leaps, often capturing its object with uncanny accuracy.

After intuition has a success, the entire process can be explained objectively — that is, from an exteriorized perspective — in a way that makes perfect sense to the rational mind. However, often such explanations have little to nothing to do with the actual process that won the success.

*

The average rationalist is unnerved by intuitive leaps. He’s fine with intuition in principle… but he does want more detail on how intuition accomplishes its goals: intuition’s methods for examining an environment, the criteria used for evaluating relevance and meaning of movements and patterns, and formulas used to calculate the trajectory of the leap…

An ambitious intuitive will confabulate plausible answers to all these questions. If he makes up fictional accounts that please the rationalists enough he can win respect and authority, and eventually accumulate enough power that he can simply do what he does without being interrogated and micromanaged into sterility (often by other creatives). Until he reaches that point he must credit all success to technique.

*

A strange variant of Peter’s principle: creatives are promoted to their level of managerial incompetence not on their leadership ability, nor on the strength of their ideas — but on the basis of their ability to falsify the creative process to fit the misconceptions of rationalists. It is by this process that corporations destroy their capacity to innovate — but on the plus-side also protect themselves against the significant discomfort of unlearning their institutional insularity, and being forced to contend with multiple human perspectives as such. It is far more comfortable to think merely objectively.

*

In its activities, intuition is not reasonable.

Does this mean that intuition and its outputs should be accepted as irrational and never be asked to account for what it does?

No — Intuition should account for itself, but primarily in the quality of its results. Intuitive ideas, once conceived should be thoroughly tested.

Does this mean that intuition cannot be assisted by method?

No — Intuition can be helped greatly by being provided optimal conditions for its free action.

The only room for method in the ideation processes is to create the most fertile, optimal conditions for intuitions, and these conditions vary greatly from person to person. Some need pristine uncritical freedom to play. Others need tension, challenge, argument, criticism. Some need solitude, others need audiences and yet others need the a precise chemistry of collaboration.

*

An intuition-friendly innovation method — and it is solely by intuition that creative and innovative ideas are conceived — will rely on research to help create the idea conditions for productive intuition. It will also be aware of how research can fail to help or even to dull intuition.

Research plays two roles:

1. Research inspires intuition toward productive ideas. It frames a situation in such a way that intuition can leap further and more accurately than it could if it just were to brainstorm ideas in a vacuum.
2. Research provides criteria by which the fitness of an intuited idea can be tested (first casually, then systematically).

Between these two kinds of research, intuition should be permitted to simply do what it does naturally.

*

In the end, though, once an idea is hatched, nurtured and matured, it must leave the nest and stand the test of reality.

If this test is lacking, some other criterion for success will assert itself, and this criterion is nearly always political power. The intuition of the most powerful person asserts itself as the judge — or rationalists will decide the matter according to what is most comfortable to the rational mind.

This is devastating to the creative process and to team culture.

Here is why: Intuitions rarely grasp one another’s insights directly. Reality is the medium by which intuitions come to agreement. Testing provides the ground by which multiple intuitions can lock into a real situation and make their individual contributions to collective understanding.

*

False accounts of intuitive processes are a lot like superstitious explanations of natural phenomena. The explanation satisfies the logical requirements of the naive intellect without actually coming close to conforming to the true dynamic.

In fact rationalism is the business world’s superstition.

*

In the medieval age, physicians bled and leeched their patients. The worsening condition of the patient caused by blood loss signaled to the medieval physician the the need for more bleeding and more leeching.

When things go downhill in business, businesses immediately respond with more process, more detailed planning, more safeguards, more accountability, increased scrutiny…

When we show someone a new way to see something, we not only call attention to new aspects of that thing, but also show how it looks if we downplay or disregard other aspects.

In other words, learning a new perspective means unlearning to emphasize what we are accustomed to emphasizing. It means remapping one’s sense of relevance.

This runs counter to many conceptions of learning, which understands knowledge to be a cumulative process. More and more facts are gathered and systematized according to one’s existing conceptions. But this kind of factual accumulation serves only to reinforce the conception by which the knowledge has been ordered.

It is incredibly difficult to unlearn this cumulative conception of learning, and many people are entirely unable to do it. This inability is called “naive realism”. Naive realists confuse their own perspective with reality itself, and therefore think without empathic considerations.

When large groups share a common naive realist perspective, they are unable to learn anything new. They can continue to absorb facts, but they cannot absorb them in any new way that places them in different relationships. They collectively ignore what doesn’t make sense to them, agreeing among themselves that it is nonsense with no sense to understand. And they also agree that what they what does make sense to them collectively is correctly understood, which means looking into the matter further is a waste of time. And because they fail to look into things with any rigor or thoroughness, they fail to see any evidence of the inadequacy of their understandings.

*

When we as individuals are unsure of our opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor. When we as members of an organization are unsure of our organizational opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor, a fellow member of our organization. This is the basic mechanism of mass insanity: “Madness is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

What if the ordinary naive realism of the business world is such a form of mass insanity? What if the very mode of naive realism we teach our children in schools, reinforce in our popular culture and news media, and enforce in the workplace is a self-destructive delusion?

What if? To anyone not caught up in it, it is obvious.

*

To naive realists, other people are understood in the factual manner one understands everything. Learn what behaviors they perform, what goals and what opinions influence the behaviors, in what context these behaviors are performed and how that context influences the behavior, and add it all to the stock of one’s knowledge. Oh — and don’t forget feelings: now we’re empathic because we’ve added subjective experience to the mix.

Our very conception of subjectivity is distorted by our naive realism.

*

The irony of naive realism: in moderation this intellectual impairment appears to be an attractive personality characteristic. This is because naive realism permits a greater concentration of will.

Naive realists have powerful convictions, act decisively, speak plainly without equivocation or qualifications, and stay the course, even when those with invalid opinions question them.

We reward naive realism with power and respect.

*

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

– W. B. Yeats

*

Actually, naive realism is not the problem. It is completely necessary that the majority of people be naive realists.

The problem always lies in the specific mode of naive realism. From time to time, for the continuance of culture, reality must be reconceived, which means the naive realists must be provided with a new, fresher, more productive, less destructive conception of reality, which must be mistaken for reality itself. Without this basic faith, humanity would lack all will and would never move mountains, build cities, establish institutions — or even make art of any kind, including philosophy. But reality is a living thing. It is born from an older reality, lives, has children, but eventually dies. Conservatives will keep the old reality alive at all costs, even if it means that reality must be forcibly sustained against nature, on an iron lung of dittoed conviction and selective eye blurring.

Who a person is determines what he makes of things.

Give a research project to three different people with three different temperaments, you’ll get three different results based on how each person views what he is doing.

A project manager will make a research project into the orderly execution of a process. The activities, the output and the sign-off are all milestones to be reached.

A designer will make a research project into the creation of a deliverable. The research findings populate the diagram, and give it content.

A scientist will make a research project into a gathering of verifiable and defensible facts.

A philosopher will make a research project into an opportunity to learn something new. Everything that is done is turned into acquisition of knowledge — preferably disruptive knowledge that reveals old understandings to be insufficient or outright wrong.

A businessman — assuming he is actually a businessman, and not a project manager, designer, scientist or philosopher — will make research into something that helps his business, either through the discovery of opportunities or the uncovering of flaws or the development of a better understanding of his business’ stakeholders.

Imagine a world where we are all finally living together harmoniously under the best form of government. A world where people can live the lives they really deserve. A world where children are well-educated and well-parented. A world where the market shapes our lives to the degree it ought to, and is regulated only where regulation is helpful. A world where employers are fair to their employees. A world where we have solved the problems of healthcare and unreasonable tax policies. A world where individuals and communities are granted their rights of self-determination within appropriate limits. A world where each individual behaves virtuously, as instructed by correctly interpreted holy scripture. A world where humankind and nature and divinity are put in their proper order. A world where we take seriously only the true claims of science and reject the pseudo-science of ideologues. A world where the bad guys have been vanquished, and the good guys are firmly in charge.

Who could imagine such a world and not want to make it a reality?

If we are serious about making this happen we will need an army of well-trained scientists, mathematicians and technologists capable of bringing it about.

It is time to get serious about education.

We only ask the questions we know how to answer.

Education has been touched by the Midas finger and made into vocational training. Children are taught to do useful things that make large quantities of money for themselves and others. And of course, professors are also expected to bring in grant money. Universities are businesses, albeit businesses of a special kind. Like all businesses, universities need money. This is why most university presidents spend more time thinking about fund-raising than education. When you set sentimentality aside and think about it rationally, which is more crucial to the existence of a university, money or education?

Government has been turned to solid gold. It is an instrument of collective economic prosperity — prosperity for its own sake.

And of course business has always existed to make money for its owners and employees. What other purpose could business serve, besides making money?

*

(Sometimes idealists claim that businesses should serve some purpose higher than profits. But businesses that do not make money do not survive. To claim that businesses do not exist to make money is as absurd as claiming that human beings do not exist to breathe air.)

*

In a world made entirely of gold, gold can only buy more gold.

I’m pretty sure most people welcome having an occupation, because they have nothing else to occupy their time, and human nature abhors a vacuum. Such people cannot comprehend how anyone could mind being assigned a purpose.

*

When people occupy me with tasks they want done according to their defined procedures, or with making products they want made to their defined specifications, that is an occupation of my time, of my energy, of my mind and of my self-identity that I welcome just about as much as a nation welcomes an occupation by a foreign power.

Maybe the etymology of the world “occupation” can shed some light on the essence of its meaning.

ORIGIN Middle English : formed irregularly from Old French occuper, from Latin occupare ‘seize.’ A now obsolete vulgar sense, to have sexual relations with, seems to have led to the general avoidance of the word in the 17th and most of the 18th cent.

That sounds about right.

A question from a couple of weeks ago:

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

One answer: when we approach truth with our ideas, and our ideas are absorbed by truth and seem intrinsic to truth — when our conceptions develop into perceptions — that is when the thinker’s love is requited.

When we insist on imposing our conceptions on truth, and we disregard how we perceive reality and prefer our explanations to our primary experience, truth does not love us.

In other words, authentic metanoia* is the requited love of truth.

Dogmatic faith of the kind that is held despite contrary evidence of perception (isn’t this the popular definition of “faith”?), as much as it pretends to be love of truth, is in fact nothing more than love of one’s own preferred image of truth. And as anyone who exalts this type of “faith” will tell you, truth does not change, and continues to defy and betray us at every opportunity. The truth we experience — the “truth of this world” — is contrasted with the reality of the “world to come” which will not betray us and cannot betray us.

*

Metanoia is a Greek word commonly translated as “repentance”. It literally means “after knowing”. It is a re-knowing of truth that changes one’s relationship to life as a whole, theoretically, practically, morally and aesthetically.

When a problem obviously exists, but clarity to articulate it is lacking, no amount of effort in solving the problem will produce a solution. It only produces more unclarity.

But this does not stop us. We create tons of alternative clarity to distract us. We execute clearly defined processes in clearly defined plans. We produce clearly defined documents. We follow clearly defined best practices. We define objectives, key performance indicators, metrics, scorecards and track to those rather than think about whether the problem (whatever it is) is actually resolved or just ignored.

Anything to avoid struggling honestly with an undefined, unarticulated, yet clearly existent problem. This kind of struggle is philosophy, and very few people care to deal with it, even so far as to admit it is ever valuable, or even necessary.

*

Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”

Philosophy’s response to such situations is to learn — and not learn particular facts, but rather to learn to make sense of the facts that exist, because the problem is not incomplete facts, but how we are attempting to make sense of those facts.

*

If you think about it, philosophy and innovation have a lot in common. They’re both about new and unfamiliar ground — about seeing things in a new way.

*

Occasionally a charitable soul tries to scrounges for something good to say about philosophy, and says “philosophy teaches people how to think clearly” as if it is like logical QA for ideas. But that is an unphilosophical misunderstanding.

Philosophy, when it is actually philosophy, teaches us how to think about things we don’t yet know how to think about. But understanding what “thinking about things we don’t yet know how to think about” means itself requires philosophical understanding. It presupposes a level of insight into how thinking is done, and how thinking participates in our perceptions of the world and our experience of life.

So maybe it would be better just to say: when something’s going seriously wrong but in a way you can’t quite pin down, and nobody can communicate to anyone else without causing unaccountably intense distress, and everyone wants to follow a different course of action for different reasons, but nobody can agree on which reasons are most relevant — hire a philosopher, even if you don’t know what the hell he could possibly do about any of it.

“‘The external conditions’, writes Einstein, ‘which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist…'”

It is interesting that Temple Grandin naturally sympathizes with animals, and through this sympathy has been able to design better experiences for them, while remaining unable to sympathize with “neurotypical” human beings.

With great effort, she has been able to derive rules to help her interact with other people and make sense of their behavior in a highly exteriorized way, resembling a physicist’s understanding of the behavior of matter under different conditions. But for all her diligent observing, pattern-finding and rule formulation, she cannot empathize. She has said that when she is in the presence of “neurotypicals” she feels like “an anthropologist on Mars”.

This offers some clues on the precise difference between empathy and sympathy. It is not that Grandin lacks all capacity for sympathy and intersubjective relationship. She easily sympathizes with animals, in a way many others find nearly miraculous. It is that she is sympathetic only to forms of subjectivity that resemble her own.

“Neurotypical” subjectivity on the other hand has greater capacity to acquire a degree of intuitive intersubjective relationship with people unlike themselves. But this is built on a foundation of sympathy. Neurotypicals intuitively sympathize with the empathic intuition of other neurotypicals. Both parties understand — or assume — that a mutual intuitive understanding is being sought — that each is attempting to intuit the other’s intuition. This assumption is false in the case of Grandin, who has no experience of this kind of mutual coming to understanding, and so she seems strange and can be misinterpreted as rude, and all sympathy is withheld.

*

In my experience, organizations tend to be oblivious to all perspectives other than that of its industry. Some fortunate organizations serve customers like themselves, who already share their perspective. Here, the organization naturally sympathizes with its customers in the way Grandin sympathizes with cattle. Other organizations are in industries so powerful, with so few real alternatives, (such as insurance, medicine, and government) that customers are forced to learn their perspective in order to deal with them. This kind of organization doesn’t have to sympathize.

But other companies differ from their customers and suffer from it. Though they are blind to the fact that perspectival differences exist at all (let alone differ) — they usually become aware of the material consequences of the difference. For instance, they may start to lose market share to more sensitive, responsive organizations, despite having an equivalent offering.

If such companies attempt to acquire an understanding of customers, more often than not they acquire an externalized, rule-based, explicit understanding similar to that of a high-functioning autistic person. That is, acquire only the kind of objective data that Grandin would seek.  Indeed most organizations work very hard to function as autistically as possible. Or to put a more positive spin on it, they strive to be scientific. To the greatest possible extent, they execute according to defined formal processes, guided all the way by validated objective facts. Whatever is “merely” intuitive, whatever cannot be operationalized, quantified and measured, is rejected on principle. Implicit, language-resistant understandings, like tacit know-how, feelings, aesthetic sensibilities and values — precisely the stuff empathy needs  — are filtered out by the processes, or distorted into facts for easier comprehension and handling.

And as a consequence, many organizations begin to take on the personality characteristics of the stereotypical physicist. Their movements are stiff, calculated and unnatural — simultaneously excessively self-conscious and self-unaware. And they also have the same rule-fixations, the same overpowering need for repetition, regularity and predictability that autistic people tend to display. These are not qualities normally associated with charm and charisma.

But no problem. At the last minute, the marketing department comes in and dresses the physicist up in a Hawaiian shirt, slathers his head with hair gel, teaches him teenage hipster slang, and gives him a crash course in pick-up artistry. Off he goes into the world, to acquire customers.

*

If companies wish to learn to empathize with customers, they will have to unlearn a lot of 17th and 18th century philosophical prejudices, and learn the new art of organizational dialogue.

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

*

When we face an enemy, we concern ourselves with the enemy’s mind. Understanding his mind is a means to the end of anticipating his actions. Respecting our enemy makes us stronger opponents.

When we love, we are concerned with actions as a means to the end of understanding someone’s mind. Love pursues the significance of every word and act, for the sake of what is behind it.

Lust, as much as it might resemble love, is actually more similar to the attitude one takes toward an enemy.

When I try to figure out what is worth living for and sacrificing for, I find it hard to put into words. The more the manifest sense of meaning is actually present, the less tempted I am to try.

But I can say with complete certainty that the three grand goals most within reach, the three most tempting answers to the question “Why?”, are false, however satisfactorily solid they feel in the hand of comprehension. These are goals founded on 1) magical speculation, 2) sound biological functioning (a.k.a. health or comfort), or 3) the acquisition of social/political/economic power.

When we offer these goals as justification for our actions we find approval and company in the world, and we find the goals achievable.